Synopses & Reviews
Angela Russo is thirty-three years old and single, stuck in a job she doesn't love and a life that seems, somehow, to have just happened. Though she inherited a flair for Italian cooking from her grandmother, she never has the time; for the past six months, her oven has held only sweaters. Tacked to her office bulletin board is a picture torn from a magazine of a cottage on the coast of Maine, a reminder to Angela that there are other ways to live, even if she can't seem to figure them out.
One day at work, Angela clicks on a tiny advertisement in the corner of her computer screen—"Do Soulmates Exist?"—and finds herself at a dating website, where she stumbles upon "MaineCatch," a thirty-five-year-old sailing instructor with ice-blue eyes. To her great surprise, she strikes up a dizzying correspondence with MaineCatch—yet as her online relationship progresses, life in the real world takes a nosedive. Interpreting this confluence of events as a sign, Angela impulsively decides to risk it all and move to Maine.
But things don't work out quite as she expected. Far from everything familiar, and with little to return to, Angela begins to rebuild her life from the ground up, moving into a tiny cottage and finding work at a local coffee shop. To make friends and make ends meet, she leads a cooking class, slowly discovering the pleasures and secrets of her new small community, and—perhaps—a way to connect her heritage to a future she is only beginning to envision.
The Way Life Should Be is about the search for the right relationship and the right life, the difficulty of finding true love, and the yearning for the home that food represents. Laced with recipes and humor, wisdom and wit, it is at once a clear-eyed portrait of Maine, a compassionate look at modern life and love, and a compelling work of literary fiction that explores the gulf between the way life is and the way we want it to be.
Review
“[Christina Baker Kline] is not only a deft and snappy writer, but a true cartographer of the human heart.” Jacquelyn Mitchard, author of The Deep End of the Ocean and Still Summer
Review
“A book about love and disappointment and risk and risotto, utterly appealing on every level.” Lauren Fox, author of Still Life with Husband
Review
“A story about the way life really can be, with a little bit of luck and just the right seasoning.” Dani Shapiro
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“Kline has a perfect sense of character and timing.” Publishers Weekly
Review
“An unassumingly beautiful story of human relationships and self-discovery...the ideal page-turning light read, with a tremendous payoff.” People
Synopsis
From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Orphan Train, and the critically acclaimed author of Bird in Hand, comes a novel of love, risk, and self-discovery--includes a special PS section featuring insights, interviews, and more.
Angela can feel the clock ticking. She is single in New York City, stuck in a job she doesn't want and a life that seems to have, somehow, just happened. She inherited a flair for Italian cooking from her grandmother, but she never seems to have the time for it--these days, her oven holds only sweaters. Tacked to her office bulletin board is a photo from a magazine of a tidy cottage on the coast of Maine--a charming reminder of a life that could be hers, if she could only muster the courage to go after it.
On a hope and a chance, Angela decides to pack it all up and move to Maine, finding the nudge she needs in the dating profile of a handsome sailor who loves dogs and Italian food. But her new home isn't quite matching up with the fantasy. Far from everything familiar, Angela begins to rebuild her life from the ground up. Working at a local coffeehouse, she begins to discover the pleasures and secrets of her new small-town community and, in the process, realizes there's really no such thing as the way life should be.
About the Author
Christina Baker Kline was born in Cambridge, England and raised there as well as in the American South and Maine. She published five books in the 1990s before changing course to take a full-time college teaching position and raise three young children. In the past few years she has begun writing again in earnest.
Her novels include The Way Life Should Be, Desire Lines and Sweet Water. She is co-author, with Christina L. Baker, of The Conversation Begins: Mothers and Daughters Talk about Living Feminism, and editor of Child of Mine, Room to Grow, and Always Too Soon. Her essays, articles, and reviews have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Yale Review, Southern Living, Ms., Parents, and Family Life, among other places.
Currently Writer in Residence at Fordham University, Kline has taught literature and creative writing at Yale, NYU, Fordham, the University of Virginia, and Drew University. She is a graduate of Yale (B.A.), Cambridge University (M.A.), and the University of Virginia (M.F.A.), where she was a Henry Hoyns Fellow in Fiction Writing. Most recently, she was a 2005 recipient of a Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation Fellowship and a Writer-in-Residence Fellowship at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She serves on the advisory board of LandEscapes, a Maine arts group, and donates her time and editing skills to a number of organizations in New Jersey and Maine.
Kline has worked as a caterer, cook, and personal chef on the Maine coast, Martha’s Vineyard, and in Charlottesville, Virginia. She lives in an old house in Montclair, New Jersey, with her husband, David Kline; three boys, Hayden, Will, and Eli; and Lucy, an English Springer Spaniel. She spends summers with extended family in an even older house on Mount Desert Island in Maine.