The Room-Mating Season
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
The masterful author of The Best of Everything takes us through a season of friendship, discovery, betrayal, and love to tell a story of four friends and the events that shaped their futures.
New York in 1963 is a place of infinite possibilities, especially when you’re young and eager for the adventure a big city offers. Leigh, Cady, Vanessa, and Susan meet when they become roommates on the Upper East Side. Nothing can diminish the exhilaration of their newfound freedom and independence—even being crammed together in a single bedroom with a kitchen too small for a table and chairs.
A casting assistant at a talent agency, Leigh is the level-headed one. Cady is a prep school teacher, emotional, passionate, and ready for love. Vanessa, a stewardess, craves her independence above all else. Susan is the mercurial, difficult one, and after one confrontation too many, makes a choice that will change the course of all their lives…
PRAISE FOR RONA JAFFE
“Reading Rona Jaffe is like being presented with a Cartier watch: you know exactly what you’re getting and it’s exactly what you want.”—Cosmopolitan
“Vivid and trenchant…Wry and very readable…A minor genius.”—New York Times Book Review
“Jaffe has not lost her wit, her keen eye for human frailties and her ear for the small but telling remark.”—Publishers Weekly
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Looking for Mr. Right and loving Mr. Wrong brings three women together in friendships that last four decades in this by-the-numbers saga by veteran Jaffe (Class Reunion, etc.). She follows the lives of three women Leigh, Cady and Vanessa who meet as ingenues in New York City, fresh out of college in 1963. The trio, plus a fourth roommate, Susan, share an Upper East Side townhouse. Leigh aspires to become a casting agent, Cady teaches high school English and Vanessa is an airline stewardess (aka a "vending machine on legs"). Susan, a mousy, slightly eccentric receptionist with a desperate air, is disliked by the other three, who eventually ask her to leave (the last straw is a case of possibly contagious warts that the hapless Susan develops). But on the weekend Susan is supposed to move out, she dies in an apparent suicide. Her death casts an intermittent pall over the next 40 years as Cady and Leigh experience life-altering romances with married men while Vanessa's surprise pregnancy finds her heading to the altar. Jaffe speeds through these decades; her portraits of the women as adults are hurried and superficial, and world events get cursory, clich d treatment ("It was late winter of 1964.... It was, and would be, a year of change. The new hot group, the Beatles, was singing their innocent hit, 'I Want to Hold Your Hand'"). The breezy romances keep the pages turning, but Jaffe's fans may feel that she's working on autopilot.
