Sudden Moves (Mira) [Paperback]

Charlotte Vale Allen (Author)

Book Description

Series: Mira | Publication Date: April 1, 2004

After years of self-imposed, fearful reclusiveness inside her home, Lucinda Hunter has started moving out into the world. She has found her family and her isolation has ended, largely thanks to Katanya Taylor, who ventured into her garden five years earlier and beckoned to Lucinda to come outside. Now a feisty, somewhat irreverent teenager, Katanya comes with her mother and grandmother to spend weekends with Lucinda -- their initial connection stronger than ever.

Everything is going well. Yet Lucinda feels an urgent anxiety, fearful that she will never have sufficient time to spend with her own very elderly grandmother, that she will never be able to absorb all the details of her family history. She is racing against time. Yet she is happier than she's been since childhood. And meeting Eli Carter, her grandmother's doctor, presents an unexpected and challenging set of new circumstances.

Then, on September 11, 2001, the world is cataclysmically changed. In the aftermath, faced with the shattering repercussions that affect everyone and everything Lucinda knows, she is pulled, finally, entirely, into a new reality.

With insightful sensitivity Charlotte Vale Allen explores the hearts and minds of Lucinda, her friends and family as they grapple with the terrible upheaval in their lives as a result of a single day's events.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This follow-up to Allen’s Fresh Air reintroduces Lucinda Hunter, a recovering agoraphobe, successful screenwriter and popular movie reviewer who grew up in her film star mother’s shadow. After discovering the truth about her absentee father’s interracial background, Lucinda devotes considerable time to connecting with her long-lost family. Inexplicably, Lucinda’s elderly Aunt Anne, a prim, skeletal fashionista, treats her with contempt and grows exceedingly possessive of the time Lucinda spends with Anne’s aged mother. Allen spends a lot of time on this family conflict, and the plot line drags. As Lucinda grapples with her newfound family and complicated past, she also struggles with crippling self-image issues resulting from the double mastectomy she underwent as a teenager. Allen takes great pains to realistically convey the transformation in Lucinda’s life when she takes an interest in her paternal grandmother’s physician, and she portrays the budding romance with delicate sensitivity. Lucinda also develops a friendly relationship with Jason, the young boy who lives next door with his troubled mother, and strengthens her bond with Katanya, the Fresh Air Fund camper who captivated her in the previous book. But the story goes awry when Allen employs the events of September 11th to drive the story forward; for those affected by the day’s terrible events, this manipulation might leave a bitter aftertaste amidst the happily ever after ending.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Popular author Allen continues the story she launched in Fresh Air [BKL My 1 03] featuring Lucinda Hunter, a Connecticut woman in her forties who has long suffered from severe agoraphobia. Lucinda's life began to open up when she met Katanya, a young girl from Harlem sent to the country by the Fresh Air Fund, and they have remained close as Katanya becomes an outspoken teenager and Lucinda discovers her deceased father's African American family. Lucinda relishes contact with her "new" relatives, especially her aged grandmother. She is determined to spend as much time as she possibly can baby-sitting the neighbor's precocious child and visiting with friends and family, and then she meets her grandmother's doctor, Eli Carter. He is also of mixed heritage, but she is very uncomfortable with the attraction she feels for him since she hasn't been involved with a man since she was 19. Just as Lucinda seems to be making progress, the tragedy of September 11, 2001, radically changes her life and perspective. Once again, Allen offers readers moving insights into the heart and mind of a woman rediscovering the world with the help of a loving family and friends. Patty Engelmann
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: Mira (April 1, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0778320367
• ISBN-13: 978-0778320364
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.1 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,133,099 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Charlotte Vale-Allen was born in Toronto and lived in England from 1961 to 1964 where she worked as a television actress and singer. She returned to Toronto briefly, performing as a singer until she emigrated to the US in 1966. She sold her first novel Love Life in 1974. Prior to this book's publication she contracted to do a series of paperback originals, with the result that in 1976 three of her books appeared in print. Her autobiography, the acclaimed Daddy's Girl, was actually the first book she wrote but it wasn't until 1980, after she'd gained success as a novelist, that the groundbreaking book was finally published. One of Canada's most successful novelists, with over seven million copies sold of her 39 books, Ms. Allen's work has been published in all English-speaking countries, in Braille, and have been translated into more than 20 languages. The mother of an adult daughter and grandmother of twins, since 1970 she has made her home in Connecticut.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars I was disappointed..., May 28, 2004

By 

Sophia (the Pacific Northwest) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Sudden Moves (Mira) (Paperback)

Maybe it's because I enjoyed "Fresh Air" very much, but I found this sequel to be very disappointing. The characters, with the exception of Lucinda, were largely static. Renee's change of character was completely unbelievable, and the plot device involved with her was lifted wholesale from one of Ms. Allen's other books. Gin hasn't changed at all, Katanya and her family appeared as "walk-ons." Although I did enjoy seeing Lucinda's transformation and budding romance, she is ALWAYS right and the people she disagrees with are ALWAYS wrong. It's really annoying. Eli also seemed to be too good to be true. Jason (Soupboy) was a lot of fun, but, again, his character seemed recycled from other books, especially Dream Train and Claudia's Shadow. Since I am complaining about recycling characters, I also noticed that this is the third time Ms. Allen has named the mother in her story "Lily."

Maybe it's just because I've read so many of her other books, but this one seemed formulaic and repetitive to me. The moving attempt to integrate 9/11 into the plot raised it from one to two stars.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Sudden Moves, April 1, 2009

By 

Memere - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Sudden Moves (Mira) (Paperback)

Sudden Moves (Mira) This book grabs your attention within the first pages. The author is descriptive but not ad nauseum. You feel the emotion as you are reading. You can just about see what is happening like you are there watching or as if you are that person. This is a MUST READ which you won't want to end. You will need a day or so of mourning when it ends because you lived in the book and now you are back in your own reality.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Exquisite!, April 12, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: Sudden Moves (Mira) (Paperback)

This is, arguably, the finest yet of Allen's books. The characters are beautifully drawn, very real. The setting is now familiar after our introduction to the cast in Fresh Air. And the writing is deceptively simple but lyrical and powerfully effective. It is a joy to see Lucinda coming back into the world, her humor and her scrappy integrity intact. Soupboy has grown into an entirely believable boy and his interaction with Lucinda has great authenticity. 9/11 is documented, moment by moment, so that it not only revives our recall of that day but it also personalizes the event as few pieces of writing could. This is a wonderful book, a must-read book. If you haven't read Fresh Air, get it and begin with it, then follow up with this rare thing: a genuinely riveting sequel.