Loving Chloe
A Novel
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
When thirty-four-year-old Chloe Morgan appears on Hank Oliver's doorstep in Cameron, Arizona, she arrives with more than her old white German shepherd, Hannah, and a rambunctious young horse in tow. Chloe is pregnant with Hank's child, and she's as tough-talking and vulnerable, skittish and tender as when last we saw her in Jo-Ann Mapson's acclaimed first novel, Hank & Chloe. As Chloe and Hank settle somewhat uneasily into domesticity, a local Navajo legend named Junior Whitebear returns home to collect his father's ashes and renew his own spirit after years spent in the art-world fast lane. When Junior arrives at the reservation, he doesn't expect to find a son he fathered unwittingly nine years ago; nor is he looking to fall in love with Chloe and to deliver her baby girl. Both events change his life, and the lives of those around him, forever. A passionate love story, Loving Chloe explores the emotional complexity of a love triangle with sympathy, humor, and compassion.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
As readers of her highly praised first novel, Hank and Chloe, will remember, Mapson's endearing heroine often behaves rashly, is exasperatingly stubborn, lies and doesn't confine her body to one bed. In reprising the protagonists of that book, Mapson has written an even more touching and provocative story, one that captures the complexities of human relationships in a situation where decent but flawed people attempt to behave honorably and yet acknowledge a triangle of passionate love. When Chloe turns up at Hank's cabin near an Indian reservation in Arizona, she has come to tell him that she's pregnant. Hank is thrilled, but Chloe refuses to talk about marriage. Hot-tempered, restless and defensive, Chloe has a mouth, an attitude and a troubled past. Training horses is in her blood; trust, fidelity and domesticity are not. Chafing at the restrictions of pregnancy, Chloe endangers the health of her baby, which is born prematurely and delivered by Junior Whitebear, just returned to the reservation from the East, where he has become wealthy and famous making Navajo jewelry. The immediate attraction between Junior and Chloe throws all three principals into a crucible of painful decisions. Meanwhile, other events--the terminal illness of Hank's mother, the disastrous visit of Chloe's teenaged friend Kit Wedler, secrets in Chloe's and Junior's pasts--interweave with further complications. Mapson's compassionate understanding of human nature distinguishes her narratives, in which even the minor players are conflicted, vulnerable and appealing. Snappy, earthy dialogue, smoldering sex scenes and specific details of horse training and Indian culture are unobtrusively integrated into a narrative that has echoes of Hillerman and Kingsolver but is distinctively and memorably Mapson's own. Literary Guild and Doubleday Book Club selections.
