Two
sisters, Sarah and Emily, are the children of divorced parents. We observe the sisters over four decades, watching them grow into two very different women. Sarah is stable and stalwart, settling into an unhappy marriage. Emily is precocious and independent, struggling with one unsatisfactory love affair after another. Richard Yates's classic novel is about how both women struggle to overcome their tarnished family's past, and how both finally reach for some semblance of renewal. Yates is one of my favorite authors. He writes so powerfully and effortlessly. In just a sentence or two, you are captured by the characters and feel immersed in their lives. I love how he writes with force and simplicity. As with all of Yates books, he captures suburban middle America so well. His books are not happy -- usually dealing with dysfunctional families, alcoholism and dissatisfaction with jobs and life. He works capture the lives of the characters so well. When I finished this book, I felt a dissatisfaction but, find that it is staying with me and the richness continues to unfold.
Rating: 4 Recommend
19th-century smalltown Canada and deals with a horrific crime. William Heath leaves his native England with his young family, eventually landing in Emden, Canada. But just as the family is feeling settled, William is accused in the local paper of embezzlement, and as the scandal peaks, William kills his family. He's sentenced to death, and the novel is taken over by a cross-section of locals—a teacher, a doctor, a boy curious about the facts of the crime—who share their thoughts about the Heaths. 
In 1913, a little girl arrives in Brisbane, Australia, and is taken in by a dockmaster and his wife. She doesn’t know her name, and the only clue to her identity is a book of fairy tales tucked inside a white suitcase. When the girl, called Nell, grows up, she starts to piece together bits of her story, but just as she’s on the verge of going to England to trace the mystery to its source, her grandaughter, Cassandra, is left in her care. When Nell dies, Cassandra finds herself the owner of a cottage in Cornwall, and makes the journey to England to finally solve the puzzle of Nell’s origins. Shifting back and forth over a span of nearly 100 years, this is a sprawling, novel, with family secrets, stories-within-stories, even a maze and a Dickensian rag-and-bone shop. 
Rita, an unconventional hair stylist, has a dream, and she is determined to find and help that lonely soul. He soon appears in the form of John Reed, an unassuming, dejected thirtysomething hovering at the back of an Alanon meeting. As their friendship blossoms into romance, John reveals that his brother brutally murdered his wife and then killed himself, leaving their three-year-old daughter, Aileen, orphaned. Aileen was, and still is, very precious to John, but the three maternal aunts who became her legal guardians will have nothing to do with him because he so closely resembles his homicidal brother. Assertive and persistent, Rita helps John win over his aunts, but as their acceptance of John grows, so does a chasm between John and Rita.
Susan Gifford, a women's magazine writer who arrives in Vietnam to write human interest stories about the war. Instead, she ends up covering combat and finds an intense friendship with Son, a Vietnamese photographer, and an equally intense love affair with Marc, a married American journalist. During an ambush, Susan and Son are captured by the Vietcong and are marched into the jungle. When they are reported missing, Marc drops a potentially big story to find them. Meanwhile, Susan begins to suspect that Son may not be who he seems. Leimbach masterfully conjures the hothouse atmosphere of foreign correspondents in Saigon in the late 1960s, and in Susan she has created a heroine who is a worthy counterpart to the real life reporters who covered the war. Whether describing a convoy taking fire, a farcical press briefing, a quiet moment between Susan and Marc, or the ironic aftermath of Susan's ordeal, Leimbach expertly captures the contradictions of the war, making this a solid addition to the literature of an endlessly reconsidered conflict.
I couldn't care less if she was fat, thin, whatever - she is a boring character and I could not even get through the whole book. To be so miserable and to focus so much on your weight and be so depressed with your life and not to take charge but just to wallow....I can't relate....thank goodness!