Hank & Chloe
Novel, A
-
- $11.99
-
- $11.99
Publisher Description
Chloe Morgan is a thirty-three-year-old part-time waitress, small-time horse trainer, and full-time thoroughly toughened Western woman living in a corner of the dwindling canyonlands of Southern California. Calloused and wary, Chloe allows herself to love with total abandon and complete faith only her horse and her dog. That is, until a quirk in the weather and a sunrise funeral service cause her to cross the path of Henry Oliver, a sedate professor of folklore at the local college, who, like Chloe, has his reasons for holding back. But once Hank steps inside Chloe's makeshift cabin in the hills, Chloe realizes she must come to terms with her losses and decide between the life of solitude she had always thought was her fate and the love of a man who seems—at first—all wrong.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
At the heart of this anything-but-typical love story we find 30-something cowgirl Chloe and 40-ish professor Hank, who meet by chance in Southern California canyon country and throw themselves into an earthy, at times painful, romance; the issues of trust, commitment and individuality constantly spark emotional brushfires between them. This first novel by Mapson, author of the story collection Fault Line, opens with Chloe assisting at a difficult foaling, and hints of her two-job days crammed with riding students and diner patrons. When Chloe and Hank actually make each other's acquaintance, he is immediately smitten, she characteristically suspicious; thus begin the chase-surrender-breakup-rapprochement sequences that will carry the novel to its conclusion. Along the way, a court case involving physical injury, faculty cutbacks at the junior college where Hank teaches folklore and mythology, and the serious illness of Chloe's beloved horse Absalom's Dancing Irish create new opportunities for the odd but endearing lovers to lean on each other or pull apart. In addition, Hank's reserved, strained upbringing and Chloe's childhood of foster homes (and the memories of an adolescent affair with a much older alcoholic trainer) send undercurrents of neediness through their day-to-day routine. Mapson delivers a funny, harsh, visceral novel, firmly focused on the center-stage twosome but populated with other memorable characters as well. Sometimes the coincidences here seem too pat, but overall, Mapson's finesse with both detail and the big picture, and her appreciation for the eloquence and explosiveness of silence between lovers, make this novel an engrossing, sensuous, resonant read. First serial to Cosmopolitan; Literary Guild alternate; author tour.
