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Category: Mainstream/Romance
Description: Novelist Cassandra Latham is determined to cling to her forties, that final hurrah before a woman slips over the abyss into fifty. But holding on isn't going to be easy, not with mourning her mother's recent death and trying to kick-start her literary career after a two-year spell of writer's block.

As Cassie edges toward the bottomless pit of mid-life angst, a journal written by her Revolutionary War ancestor may just help her connect the past to the present and make peace with her future. With a touch of humor, Cassie copes with monumental change--from her daughter and only child rushing into marriage to being uprooted from her ancestral Vermont home--to finally acknowledging that the invention of polyester stretch pants was a darn good idea after all.

Cassandra Latham strives to survive this pivotal passage, a time when autumn falls in every woman's life...

Genres: Mainstream Fiction
eBook Publisher: Amber Quill Press, 2010
eBookwise Release Date: April 2010

Available eBook Formats: OEBFF Format (IMP) [373 KB]
Words: 81471
Reading time: 232-325 min.

What would Mother think of me now? My editor had been hounding me for months to produce the last book promised in our publishing contract. But I'd been inflicted with a kind of literary constipation. I couldn't keep writing titillating romances about throbbing manly members anxious for feminine buds budding with luscious lust. If I ever found my muse again, I'd kill her. I tottered on the brink of middle age, feeling like a failure. Okay, maybe an accomplished failure. I'd been published, right? Thankfully my mother never read any of my stuff. Delusional to the end, she always clung to the futile hope I'd pen the great American novel one day. I had to ask myself if the tripe I wrote was worth the struggle it had taken to earn my M.F.A. from UCLA.

I looked across the cemetery where Achilles Roger Latham lay buried, the first of our family to make it to the New Hampshire Grants, the future state of Vermont, home to our clan ever since. Burnt in the hand, some of my relatives had said, Achilles was rumored to have been a convict who'd been indentured to a wealthy New York clan. As a child I'd made a rubbing of the weathered engraving on the man's headstone. "Achilles Roger Latham, b. 1745 d. 1783 age 38 years 3 months 4 days. He who cheated could not cheat death. He meant no harm."

I'd always wanted to dig him up, figuratively speaking, and write the story of a man who had most likely been a rebel in probably more ways than anyone in my family may have guessed. Yes, indeed, that book could have well been the best thing I'd ever done. The tale of a Green Mountain Boy. But whenever I'd talked about starting the project, Mother always nixed the idea. Made me believe no one would want to read about an eighteenth century bum.

I stood, eyes focused across the residence of so many departed souls and said aloud as if I were being sworn in before a jury of my peers, "I'm going to write his story."

But as I turned away I thought I heard my mother speak across the time and space separating us now. "Good luck, Cassie. You're going to need it."