American Icon: A Novel - Hardcover

Booth, Pat

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0316102121 ISBN 13: 9780316102124

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company, 1999

Synopsis

As Kate Haywood accepts her "Woman of the Year" award, she is truly happy for the first time in years. Finally she is being recognized: for building a homemaking empire of bestselling books, a top-rated television show, and an award-winning magazine. She has inspired women worldwide to serve homemade apple brown betty, to stencil their bathroom walls with pastel designs, to grow dozens of varieties of peonies in their backyard gardens. She is a role model to millions. But as she dutifully thanks her family in her acceptance speech, she has the nagging sense that something is missing. She knows that she hasn't been a perfect wife and mother, and she resolves to spend more quality time with her family, to have them come first for a change.

But that very night, her dream is destroyed. Peter, the literary agent who pitched Kate's first bestseller back in the 1980s, leaves her after more than twenty-five years of marriage. Kate's life is shattered. She is alone, and she knows that her critics are laughing as the dirty laundry of the world's most successful homemaker is hung out to dry.

Slowly, supported by the love of her daughter, Samantha, she fights back. But she has a decision to make. Is her business enough to keep her happy? Or should she put her career on a back burner and battle to save her marriage? Complicating matters, Steve Gardiner, a handsome sculptor, enters the picture and unlocks the passions that Kate hasn't felt in years. When shocking events conspire to deepen her bonds with both Steve and Peter, Kate is forced to decide between two very different lives. Safety, security, and family - or desire, excitement, and mystery......

About this title

About the Author

Pat Booth is the bestselling author of such novels as PALM BEACH, BEVERLY HILLS, MIAMI, and MARRY ME. She is also the author of three books on photography and is herself an accomplished photographer. She lives with her husband and their two children in Palm Beach, New York, and London.

Reviews

Booth's latest novel (after Marry Me), the saga of a Martha Stewart-like lifestyle guru's tempestuous life, is a for-fans-only effort. In 1970, 20-year-old Kate Haywood, who has "Nordic features chiseled like the ice floes and fjords in which her Viking ancestors had sailed," is a waitress at center-of-everything-hip Max's Kansas City in Manhattan. There, she meets her future husband, literary agent Peter Haywood, who soon turns her good design/fashion/cooking sense into an empire from which the egomaniacal Kate later excludes him. Driven away by Kate's tantrums, Peter leaves her and their daughter, Sam, for her scheming assistant Ruth, knocking Kate into a depression that nearly destroys her business network. Running parallel to this story line is the doomed marriage of Steve (an artist) and Donna (a surgeon), who split when Steve blames Donna for their young son's accidental death. After Kate has rebounded from her own divorce and saved her business, she and the proud but sensitive Steve fall in love in East Hampton. But is her company safe from the backstabbing Ruth? Is Peter gone forever? Booth's melodrama spins merrily on, but the cliche-ridden prose keeps it strictly humdrum. Set in a world where sexually aroused men's voices are "husky," efficient business women look "cucumber cool" and a choice at a forked road will "change her life forever," this uninspired romance fiction lacks panache.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A glamorous Sixties model marries, has children, starts her own business?and then watches it all fall apart. From the author who has taken us from Malibu to Palm Beach.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0316102121
• ISBN 13: 9780316102124
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 384