Riverside Drive - Softcover

Van Wormer, Laura

3.65

130 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312915721 ISBN 13: 9780312915728

Publisher: St Martins Pr, 1993

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The dark secrets, infidelities, and everyday struggles of five couples residing on New York's Riverside Drive are vividly portrayed, along with the irreverent yet loyal cleaning woman who brings them together

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From Publishers Weekly:

Cassy and Michael Cochran are TV news producers. Michael is a drinker and womanizer, Cassy a silent sufferer. Howard Stewart, successful (though underpaid) book editor, is the unhappy husband of Melissa, a banker who was born rich and is getting richer. Sam and Harriet Wyatt, a black couple, are well-off and happy until Sam discovers that his employer does business with South Africa. Amanda Miller, a wealthy, reclusive divorcee, is a secret voluptuary, and elderly Emma Goldblum lives with her cat at the edge of poverty. These people inhabit the gracious apartment buildings that line Manhattan's Riverside Park. The one thing that connects them is their spunky cleaning lady, Rosanne DiSantos, who lives with her drug addict husband in a seedy West Side hotel. We follow this group from cocktail party to block party, through marital and job strife. Van Wormer's prose, in her first novel, ranges from florid to indifferent, but her realistic characters and situations, combined with occasional blasts of sensationalized sex, will keep her readers turning the pages. Doubleday Book Club main selection; Literary Guild featured alternate.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal:

The warm, feisty cleaning lady works for families living on New York's Riverside Drive. Mondays are for the loveless yuppies; Tuesdays, for the romantic, but disillusioned, heiress; Wednesdays, for the successful black couple with alcoholism in their past; Thursdays, for the elderly and impoverished lady; and Fridays, for the married, though in crisis, TV producers. The lives of these families intertwine improbably in this fluffy, predictable, but pleasant, first novel. Ironically, one character is an editor committed to good literature; the author herself is a former editor at Doubleday, which is heavily promoting this book. But why quibble over trite phrases or misplaced modifiers when this book is what everyone will be reading on the beach? Literary Guild featured alternate. Janet Boyavin Blundell, M.L.S., Brookdale Coll., Lincroft, N.J.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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