Cascade: A Novel
Maryanne O'Hara
Language: English
Pages: 384
ISBN: 0143123513
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
A locked box and a deathbed promise. A town threatened with extinction by flooding.
And a raft of difficult personal decisions.
"What do we have to give up to be whom we yearn to be? CASCADE unfolds like a Shakespearean tragedy,with an ending you won't see coming." The Boston Globe
"Gorgeously written and involving, Cascade explores the age-old conflict between a woman's perceived duty and her deepest desires." People Magazine, People Pick
- The Boston Globe Book Club - Inaugural Pick
- People Magazine "People Pick of the Week"
- People Magazine "Great Reads, New in Paperback"
- MLA "Must Read" Fiction Honors
- Finalist, Massachusetts Book Award
- Slate Magazine "Best Books," "Best Summer Reads″
- WBUR Radio Boston: Good Reads for Summer
- Boston Globe "Best of the New″
- Library Journal "Best Bet"
Happy Joe set the block into its tray and she saw, with new eyes, how grubby the shelves were, littered with flakes of dried milk, soft mold like a mouse’s fur starting to spread on a Florida orange she’d been excited to get her hands on, then saved so long she’d ruined. She gave in to a hankering for a cup of tea even though she knew that the idea of a cup of tea—sitting still, calmly sipping—was more appealing than actually sitting still and trying to calmly sip. She didn’t even really like
those grooves.” “Forget it,” he said. His lips brushed her ear, his voice vibrating her eardrum. “It’s too much for you.” “No.” She didn’t want to stop. “Try again. We have to be synchronized here. I think we have to raise it a bit then be sure it slides evenly down, inside the grooves.” “I don’t want you to get hurt.” She was far from hurt; she was exhilarated. She could do this forever, stand with him behind her, holding her, his mouth so close to her hair, the nape of her neck. “I won’t.
and duck into doorways to avoid having to acknowledge her. She breathed in the old-wood smell of the playhouse—surely Asa wouldn’t see it destroyed, just to hurt her. The only good thing about a pregnancy would be that the playhouse would belong to the child. A child of the union, her father had stipulated. But the thought of pregnancy made something in her rise up hysterically. She couldn’t be pregnant, she simply couldn’t. A woman living alone with a baby in New York, living anywhere in the
about overhearing Lowell confirm that Cascade was doomed. Zeke returned from a trip to Boston on July 1 and mentioned that his friend at the State House thought the deal was sealed: Cascade would be chosen. People gathered in the streets, in the Handy and the Brilliant and in Spaulding Drug and the Criterion Theater to talk, to mull over what was fact and what was still speculation. The first week of July, none of the week’s newsreels were light. One delivered news of another dust storm in
through her chest—fear that she might regret what she was doing, hope that she was indeed doing the right thing. And like an underpinning to every thought, the ever-present, pulsating concern that she had been careless, that after all this, she might find herself pregnant. Here, in new surroundings, feeling physically no different than she ever had, the idea seemed both absurd and terrifying, so unnerving it made her jump to her feet. She couldn’t be. And she simply had to stop thinking about it.