The Room-Mating Season - Hardcover

Jaffe, Rona

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0525947132 ISBN 13: 9780525947134

Publisher: Dutton Adult, 2003

Synopsis

A powerful new novel about life and love by Rona Jaffe, the internationally bestselling author The New York Times Book Review hails as "a minor genius."

For over five decades, Rona Jaffe has captivated readers with her "deft, irresistible storytelling" (Los Angeles Times). Now this masterful author, whose books have sold more than 23 million copies worldwide, 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.

Leigh, Cady, Vanessa, and Susan meet when they become roommates in a townhouse on Manhattan's Upper East Side. New York in 1963 is a place of magical enchantment and infinite possibilities, especially when you're young and eager for the adventure a big city offers. Even being crammed together in a single bedroom with a kitchen too small to accommodate a table and chairs can't diminish their high spirits. A casting assistant at a talent company, Leigh is the level-headed one, the calm at the center of the whirlwind that is their lives. Cady is a prep-school teacher, emotional, passionate, and ready for love. Vanessa, a stewardess, craves her independence above all else. Susan is the wild card. Mercurial and unconventional, she makes a decision that will have far-reaching consequences in her life-and in the lives, through the years, of the others.

Sleeping and dreaming side by side, Leigh, Cady, Vanessa, and Susan could not know the decisions they made in 1963 would be challenged later, not only because they had been young when they made them, but because the world itself was going to change around them. And then, of course, there were the events in their young lives that no one could control...the events that changed everything.

About this title

About the Author

Rona Jaffe is the New York Times bestselling author of the internationally acclaimed novels The Road Taken, The Cousins, Family Secrets, and Five Women, as well as the classic bestsellers Class Reunion and The Best of Everything. She is the founder of the Rona Jaffe Foundation, which presents a national literary award to promising female writers.

Reviews

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, cliched 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.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Jaffe, author of The Road Taken (2000) and After the Reunion (1985), presents another gentle, knowing, and compulsively readable coming-of-age story. The year is 1963, and college friends Leigh and Cady are determined to begin their adult lives amid the cosmopolitan social whirl of New York City. An ad for roommates brings two more young women into the circle: Vanessa, a sophisticated airline stewardess, and awkward, needy misfit Susan. Leigh, Cady, and Vanessa become fast friends, united by their success with men, their good looks, and their social savvy. But Susan's eccentricities grate on her roommates, and her clumsy bids for their attention ultimately end in tragedy. Jaffe traces the lives of her characters over the next four decades with wit and poignancy. Sensible, generous Leigh falls in love and ultimately achieves both domestic and career success. Worldly Vanessa finds herself trapped in a marriage of convenience and drifts into a series of infidelities. The inner lives of all of these women are compelling, but it's the impetuous, self-centered, and recklessly loving Cady who is the lifeblood of the whole story. Jaffe is wise and witty as ever, and her latest novel will delight her fans--and win her some new ones. Meredith Parets
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Dutton Adult
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0525947132
• ISBN 13: 9780525947134
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 384