A novel for anyone who’s ever had to risk
it all to be the person they wanted to be…

From the critically acclaimed authors of Literacy and Longing in L.A. comes the ultimate story for late bloomers of every exotic shade. And a quirky young heroine with a knack for reinvention and a flair for the unexpected no reader will ever forget.

Thirty, newly single, and desperately in need of a paycheck, inveterate bird-watcher Cassie Shaw finds herself doing something that goes against all her principles. She lies on a résumé to land a job and finds herself employed at an elite university working for a pair of professors as unique as the rare birds she covets. One of them is the sexy, handsome, cheerfully aristocratic expert in animal behavior, Professor William Conner. Under his charismatic tutelage, Cassie begins her personal transformation into the person she was meant to be while meeting the kinds of people she has never met before. But when your entire future and your unlikely new career teeters on an unbearable untruth, the masquerade can’t go on forever. And when Cassie steps out from behind her mask it will transform her life—and the lives of those around her—forever....

From the critically acclaimed authors of the #1 Los Angeles Times bestseller Literacy and Longing in L.A. comes the ultimate story for late bloomers of every exotic shade. And a quirky young heroine with a knack for reinvention and a flair for the unexpected no reader will ever forget.

Thirty, newly single, and desperately in need of a paycheck, inveterate bird-watcher Cassie Shaw finds herself doing something that goes against all her principles. She lies on a résumé to land a job and finds herself employed at an elite university working for a pair of professors as unique as the rare birds she covets. One of them is the sexy, handsome, cheerfully aristocratic expert in animal behavior Professor William Conner. Under his charismatic tutelage, Cassie begins her personal transformation into the person she was meant to be while meeting the kinds of people she has never met before. But when your entire future and your unlikely new career teeter on an unbearable untruth, the masquerade can’t go on forever. And when Cassie steps out from behind her mask it will transform her life—and the lives of those around her—forever....

Some women shop. Some eat. Dora cures the blues by bingeing on books—reading one after another, from Flaubert to bodice rippers, for hours and days on end. In this wickedly funny and sexy literary debut, we meet the beguiling, beautiful Dora, whose unique voice combines a wry wit and vulnerability as she navigates the road between reality and fiction.

Dora, named after Eudora Welty, is an indiscriminate book junkie whose life has fallen apart—her career, her marriage, and finally her self-esteem. All she has left is her love of literature, and the book benders she relied on as a child. Ever since her larger-than-life father wandered away and her book-loving, alcoholic mother was left with two young daughters, Dora and her sister, Virginia, have clung to each other, enduring a childhood filled with literary pilgrimages instead of summer vacations. Somewhere along the way Virginia made the leap into the real world. But Dora isn’t quite there yet. Now she’s coping with a painful separation from her husband, scraping the bottom of a dwindling inheritance, and attracted to a seductive book-seller who seems to embody all that literature has to offer—intelligent ideas, romance, and an escape from her problems.

Joining Dora in her odyssey is an elderly society hair-brusher, a heartbroken young girl, a hilarious off-the-wall female teamster, and Dora’s mother, now on the wagon, trying to make amends. Along the way Dora faces some powerful choices. Between two irresistible men. Between idleness and work. And most of all between the joy of well-chosen words and the untidiness of real people and real life.


From the Hardcover edition....