Fortyish freelance writer Lottie leaves her new husband in Chicago to spend part of the summer in Cambridge, Massachusetts, getting the family house ready to sell now that her brother Cameron has placed their alcoholic mother in a nursing home. While she and her son Ryan paint and clean, Lottie examines the concept of love in an article she is writing, studying her own troubled marriage and Cameron's resumption of a love affair with childhood sweetheart Elizabeth. For Elizabeth, who is staying with her mother after leaving her philandering husband, this romance is just a fling. But Cameron's obsessive love for the golden girl of his youth leads to the tragic accident at the center of this affecting story. Through the intelligent and captivating character of Lottie, Miller ( Family Pictures, LJ 4/15/90) explores the world of relationships with astonishing insight to create an engrossing, rewarding novel. Highly recommended.-- Patricia Ross, Westerville P.L., Ohio (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

/*STARRED REVIEW*/ Sue Miller's novels cry out for film adaptation. Not that they aren't terrifically involving to read; they hold you rapt with their great specificity and tentacled plots. But they are also meticulously choreographed and the dialogue is hammered to perfection. Her newest is a splendidly complex and circular drama about class distinctions and various forms of love. Lottie, a wonderfully ornery character, has returned to Cambridge, Massachusetts to help her brother, Cameron, clean out and freshen up the dumpy little house they grew up in while their father rotted away in jail and their mother drank. Mother is now institutionalized and it's time to sell the old place. This project is also a good excuse to take a break from her difficult marriage. This Cambridge street is a microcosm of the American class system; their side is trashy, the other patrician. It just so happens that Elizabeth, the rich girl from across the way who made Lottie's youth miserable and stole Cameron's soul, is also "home" for the summer to escape marital complications. While she and Cameron rekindle their dangerous passion, Lottie does a lot of thinking about her difficult past, her need for solitude, and her feelings towards her husband. Reveries and dalliances are brutally interrupted when Cameron kills a young woman in a freak car accident. As everyone is drawn into the snare of tragedy, tempers ignite and they confront each other with stunning vehemence, eloquence, and anger, arguing mightily over the demands of love and other baffling yet crucial issues of responsibility and maturity. A truly cathartic and memorable performance, this will attract and delight a large audience. (Reviewed Jan. 1, 1993)0060179791Donna Seaman

Here, the author of Family Pictures (1990), etc., graces us with nothing less than a disputation on the nature of love--from whence, at least in Miller's world, all other emotions (and a great deal of often extreme behavior) come. This time out, her extraordinarily intelligent, if agonized, protagonist is Charlotte Reed, a nonfiction writer and divorcée with a grown son, Ryan, and new husband, Jack, a widowed oncologist. But as the story begins, Charlotte's left Jack, presumably to get her aging mother's Cambridge home in shape to be sold--since her brother, Cam, has put their mother in a home. Charlotte's other reason for flying the coop is that she doesn't think she can hack the new marriage: Jack's teenaged daughter is a pain, and Jack himself seems unable to stop grieving for his first wife. And her real reason, she comes to understand, has to do with being afraid that she doesn't love Jack the way she used to. She yearns for a kind of wild, romantic love, and sees it in the way her brother behaves with his new flame, Elizabeth, a neighbor in Cambridge. Elizabeth has returned home because her husband is playing around. She starts doing so, too, with Cam, though for him the relationship is less a fling than an expression of his unbalanced approach to life. Tragedy strikes in the form of an accident that kills Elizabeth's au pair girl, with Cam behind the wheel. Her death sets Charlotte off on an intense emotional hegira, which eventually leads her back to Jack and a different kind of love--a love that has as much loss in it as passion. Seared by several extraordinary arguments--between Lottie and Cam and others--and by a handful of characterizations so full that they suggest whole novels revolving around Miller's secondaries. Miller's special brand of intelligent emotionalism reaches its zenith here: it's deep, resonant, splendid. (Book-of-the-Month Main Selection for April)

Perhaps because her work ( The Good Mother ; Family Pictures ) is seductively readable and sells so well, Miller has been underrated as a serious writer. Yet she tackles important themes and creates complex characters who must confront weaknesses in their own natures to come to terms with the conditions of their lives. This novel is her best to date, a forceful and resonant portrayal of a woman who is trying to escape from her past. Lottie and Cameron Reed and Elizabeth Harbour grew up in Cambridge, Mass., the Reeds in a ramshackle house across the street from the Harbour's elegant manse--a social chasm they became aware of as teenagers. Circumstances now bring them back together: her second marriage in jeopardy, Lottie has flown from Chicago to clean out her mother's possessions; self-absorbed, glamorous Elizabeth has fled a marital crisis; and Cameron, who has always adored Elizabeth, rekindles their old romance. The Reed siblings are emotionally dysfunctional, due in part to their impoverished childhoods as offspring of a father who was imprisoned for embezzlement and an alcoholic, abusive mother. Independent, willful but vulnerable, Lottie suffers from repressed rage and guilt, unconscious denial and an inability to give or accept love. A tragedy brings the various relationships into collision. Miller's writing is controlled, authoritative and charged with meaning; she excels in creating credibly flawed but appealing characters while exploring a larger question: Is love possible in the post-Freudian age? BOMC main selection. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved