Cloud Nine - Hardcover

Rice, Luanne

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0553110632 ISBN 13: 9780553110630

Publisher: Bantam, 1999

Synopsis

Every once in a while a novelist comes along who can illuminate the most secret places of our hearts--who can put into words the feelings we cannot...and sometimes dare not...express.  Luanne Rice is one such novelist and Cloud Nine is her most evocative, emotionally powerful, and compelling work yet.  It is a novel brimming with the beauty and fragility of life whose powerful message will resonate in your own life long after the final page is turned.

Sarah Talbot surely thought she'd never live to see another birthday.  But against all odds, she beat the disease that threatened to take her life and she reopened her bedding shop, Cloud Nine.  It is a new beginning for Sarah--a fresh start at life that few are given.  It is a time to take roads she always passed by, to experience a world she'd all too often watched from the sidelines.  And Sarah is determined to take every advantage of her newfound opportunity.

Her first adventure comes during a special birthday present from her friends: a ride over upstate New York in a small chartered plane.  From there she views the spectacular autumn foliage.  Yet, as so often happens when one takes chances, the unexpected occurs.  For it is on this flight that she meets Will Burke, a former Navy pilot whose strength and confidence attract Sarah as much as the vulnerability he tries hard to conceal.

These two fellow travelers find in each other a kindred spirit and a bond that will give them the courage to confront the past and have faith in the future...no matter how uncertain.

A novel shimmering with emotion, grace, and beauty, Cloud Nine is a work of pure magic by one of our most enchanting storytellers.  It is the kind of novel you will cherish and want to share with the most important people in your life.

About this title

About the Author

Luanne Rice is the author of Secrets of Paris, Stone Heart, Angels All Over Town, Home Fires, Crazy in Love (made into a TNT Network feature movie), and Blue Moon, which has just been turned into a two-hour CBS television movie.  Originally from Connecticut, she now lives in New York City with her husband.

From the Back Cover

Praise for Cloud Nine:

"Luanne Rice touches the deepest, most tender corners of the heart."
--Tami Hoag, author of A Thin Dark Line

"A celebration of family and the healing power of love. Poignant and powerful, Cloud Nine is one of those rare books that refresh and renew the landscape of women's fiction for a new generation of readers."
--Jayne Ann Krentz, author of Sharp Edges

"Cloud Nine is warm, smart, and deeply touching. This is a novel filled with poignant emotion and the fine, soft twist of elegant storytelling. Luanne Rice gives the reader a heartfelt look inside the workings of ordinary yet extraordinary lives."
--Deborah Smith, author of When Venus Fell

"Immensely moving...Tender and heartbreaking."
--Iris Johansen, author of The Face of Deception

An Alternate Selection of The Literary Guild and a Doubleday Book Club "GEM"

From the Inside Flap

n a while a novelist comes along who can illuminate the most secret places of our hearts--who can put into words the feelings we cannot...and sometimes dare not...express. Luanne Rice is one such novelist and Cloud Nine is her most evocative, emotionally powerful, and compelling work yet. It is a novel brimming with the beauty and fragility of life whose powerful message will resonate in your own life long after the final page is turned.

Sarah Talbot surely thought she'd never live to see another birthday. But against all odds, she beat the disease that threatened to take her life and she reopened her bedding shop, Cloud Nine. It is a new beginning for Sarah--a fresh start at life that few are given. It is a time to take roads she always passed by, to experience a world she'd all too often watched from the sidelines. And Sarah is determined to take every advantage of her newfound opportunity.

Her f

Reviews

Readers sympathetic to Rice's (Blue Moon) highly sentimental take on the eternal power of love and family will enjoy this skillfully wrought tale of courage on the part of a single mother recovering from a brain tumor. Sarah Talbot, who has built a down-bedding mail-order business ("Cloud Nine") based on the products of her father's farm in Maine, finds new joy in life's simple pleasures, such as celebrating the 37th birthday she thought she'd never see. Her delight proves infectious to others in her small upstate New York community. They include Susan Burke, also known as Secret or Snow, a troubled teenager from a broken home who is still grieving over the accidental death of her brother; and Susan's father, pilot Will Burke, who is trying to cope with his failed marriage and his inability to save his son. In quiet, unassuming prose, Rice fashions a tightly paced story that is hard to put down, delicately constructing the blossoming relationship between Sarah and Will. At the same time, she effectively depicts the impact a loving person can have on an adolescent simply longing for a real connection with a caring adult. The Talbot family's island home, where Sarah's recalcitrant father and her estranged teenage son live together in a complex relationship, is idealized as a healing environment for the Burkes. The plot veers into melodrama at the end, when love and death meet in a heartbreaking scene, but Rice's message remains a powerful one: the strength of precious family ties can ultimately set things right. Author tour.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The obstacles inherent in finding true love, fighting terminal cancer, reconciling a broken family and maintaining the family farm are resolvedall within a few weeksin this latest schmaltz-fest from Rice (Home Fires, 1995, etc.). Having just been given a clean bill of health after battling a brain tumor, 37-year-old Sarah Talbot is treated for her birthday to an airplane ride over rural New York. Her pilot, the dashing Will Burke, takes a fast shine to her rhapsodic happiness, which alchemizes his leaden gloom into golden hope. Thats just what Will needs since the disintegration of his family: After his son Fred drowned (Will blames himselfhes a trained Navy rescue operative), he and his wife divorced, he quit the Navy to become a charter pilot, and his teenage daughter Susan lost, or seemed to lose, her marbles. Sarah and Will meet again by chance at a country fair, where Sarah hires him to take her back to Elk Island for Thanksgiving. Dangling off the coast of Maine, this remote spot was Sarah's childhood refuge; her teenage son and father now live there. Sarah longs to bring the runaway Mike back home with her and to reconcile with the father whos never forgiven her for leaving the island. Meanwhile, Will's daughter Susan stows away for the trip to escape the dreariness of life with her tight-lipped mother and pretentious stepfather. The island is a fantasy for all concerned. Though they barely know each other, Sarah and Will fall madly in love; Susans mesmerized by everythingisland life, Sarah, and handsome Mike. When Mike falls through an iced-over pond, Will even manages to save him. But nothing this good, of course, can last. An unbelievable death walk down the aisle tops off this syrupy concoction. (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Sarah Talbot is the survivor of a very difficult form of cancer. She has once again taken charge of her destiny and reopened her bedding shop, Cloud Nine, when an emotionally wounded young pilot and his daughter come into her life. The trio together search for the meaning of life, family, and everlasting love in this breathtaking celebration of the human spirit. Rice (Home Fires, LJ 5/15/95) has created one of those rare reading experiences that we always hope for when cracking the cover of a book but rarely find. The characterizations are marvelously executed, the relationships between players are reasonable and real, and the Maine and upstate New York settings are excellent backdrops. What a joy! Buy plenty, and stock up on Kleenex.
-?Beth Gibbs, Charlotte & Mecklenburg Cty. P.L., NC
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Will Burke stood in the hangar, his head under the hood of the Piper Aztec.  Fall was his biggest season.  He needed all three of the planes he owned serviced and ready to fly.  The lake region was a tourist destination, with all the cider mills and foliage trails.  He operated fifteen-minute aerial tours, especially popular during the Fort Cromwell Fair.  The end of October brought parents' weekends at two area colleges, with scheduled flights back and forth to New York, shuttling parents to see the big games and visit their kids.

At the sound of tires crunching over the gravel outside, he wiped his socket wrench on a blue rag and placed it on his tall red toolbox.  He checked his watch: four o'clock.  A friend of his daughter's had booked a quick birthday tour, up and down, a fifteen-minute scenic loop of the lake and mountain.  An easy thirty dollars, and he'd be back to the tune-up in no time.  

Tucking his work shirt into his jeans, Will walked outside to greet his customers.  He didn't really feel like taking a break, but the afternoon was sunny, and the fresh air felt good, so he found himself smiling at the car anyway.  He waved as they pulled up.

Meg and Mimi Ferguson got out.  Meg was the town visiting nurse, and she yelled hello with cheerful efficiency, making Will smile a little wider.  He hung back, wondering which one had the birthday.  His daughter sometimes baby-sat for Mimi, and judging from what he remembered, Mimi must be about ten.  

But then someone new got out of the car, a woman Will had never seen.  She was small and thin, the size of an underfed teenager.  Her skin was pale and translucent, like high cloud cover on a fall day, and her head was covered with blond peach fuzz.  It was the way she looked at the sky that caught Will's attention: with total rapture, as if she hadn't ever seen it so blue before, or as if she couldn't believe she was about to go up in it.  

"Ready to fly?" he asked.

"Which plane, Mr.  Burke?" Mimi asked, excited.

"That one," he said, pointing at the two-seater Piper Cub.

"We can't all fit?" Mimi asked, disappointed.

"Now, Mimi--" Meg began.

"Sorry, Mimi," Will said.  "The big plane's getting an oil change.  If I'd known . . ."

"You know what, Mimi?" the woman said eagerly.  "Why don't you go up for me?"

"It's your birthday flight," Mimi said.  "It was my idea, and we want  you to go."

"Happy birthday," Will said to the woman.  

"Thank you." Again, that expression of amazement, as if she had never been so happy.  She stared at him directly, and he had that shock he felt when coming upon a person he knew from somewhere, hardly at all, but who has undergone a drastic change of appearance.  A weight gain or loss, a different hairstyle, a drop in health.  He had seen this woman around town looking quite different.  Then, for some strange reason, he pointed at the sky.  

"Ready?" he asked.

"I am," she said.  

"Let's go," he said.



They flew north.  The pilot took her over the lake and western ridge, where the leaves blazed in the orange light.  The craggy rocks glowed red, and the lake itself was deep blue-black.  Sarah pressed her forehead against the cold window, looking out.  She watched red-tailed hawks circling below the plane, their shadows dark and mysterious on the lake's smooth surface.  

"Ever been up in a small plane before?" the pilot asked.

"Yes," Sarah said.

"Don't know why, I thought it was your first time," he said.  "The way Mimi and her mom were so excited about arranging it for you."

"I think maybe I mentioned to Meg that I love flying," Sarah said.  "Although I don't do it as much now as I used to.  Lots of weekends, I'd be on a plane just slightly bigger than this, flying home to Maine from Boston."

"I'm from New England too," he nodded.  "That lake's pretty, but it's not--"

"The Atlantic," she said, grinning.  

He laughed too, the response of a man who had saltwater in his veins, who for some reason, like Sarah, had found himself living in upstate New York after a lifetime by the sea.  

"I'm Will Burke," he said, taking his hand off the controls to shake her hand.

"Sarah Talbot."

"Hi, Sarah."

"Who was that I saw in the window back at the airport?" Sarah asked.  "That young girl looking out?"

"My daughter, Susan," Will said.

"A teenager?"

"Fifteen," he said.  "Going on thirty."

"I know the syndrome," Sarah said, glancing east, as if she could see across four states to a tiny island off the coast of Maine.

They kept heading north, even though they had reached the midway point, been in the air for seven and a half minutes, and should have turned for home.  Down below was an endless pine forest.  It covered the hills in all directions, an unfathomable expanse of green, and the dying sun threw glints of gold in the tall treetops.  Sarah felt her eyes fill with tears.

Will glanced over.

"I didn't think I'd be here," Sarah said.  "For another birthday."

"But you are," Will said.  

He pulled back on the controls, and the plane began to climb.  They left the earth behind, flying straight into the sky.  Sarah felt the exhilaration of adventure, something new, of being alive.  Her heart was in her throat, gravity pulling her shoulder blades against the leather seat.  Will glanced quickly over.

The plane dove down.  Holding tight, Sarah felt the plane do one loop-de-loop, then another.  Will's hand was so close, she wanted to grab for it.  It was a sudden, mad impulse, and it passed.  The plane steadied off.  Sarah's fifteen minutes were up, but they kept flying north for a while longer before they turned for home.

Edition details

• Publisher: Bantam
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0553110632
• ISBN 13: 9780553110630
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336