Claudia Riess - Love and Other Hazards - Review & Giveaway

About the Book

Glenda Fieldston is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art with her seven-year-old daughter, Astrid, when Eugene Lerman comes walking by with his eight-year-old daughter, Meredith, a schoolmate of Astrid’s. The families spot each other, Glenda and Eugene engage in long-range cursory assessments, and then they go their separate ways. But not for long. Glenda and Eugene cross paths professionally soon after, and circumstances at work bring them into close association. So begins a friendship fraught with complications. Glenda’s independence is self-imposed and fierce. Eugene’s was foisted on him by a wife who left him. Although Glenda’s and Eugene’s personal demons are incompatible, their longings are, confoundedly, in harmony. Their cautious friendship is further inhibited by past and present relationships, and it remains to be seen if they can break out of their set ways to make a break for uncharted love.

Review

What happens when a man views the women in his life as different countries? Take a look at who's on Eugene Lerman's map.

"Connie was a country he had little desire to visit, like Malaysia, to which an irresistibly cheap charter flight had been arranged."

"Emily was a virgin isle, a place to which compassion and curiosity had drawn him, but from which he was looking to build a getaway raft."

"Glenda was a foreign country whose natives spoke to him in a language that resonated musically with his own, but whose dictator had cancelled all the goddamn flights to its shores."

It's sort of how he thinks of romance when he stands before the rushing splendor of Niagara Falls.

"Nothing stays the same. Everything evolves… gives… no matter how tough and hard you think you are. Change is good. This isn't a still life - that's why it's so beautiful. It changes, but it endures."

He thinks about winning a woman over as being on a battlefield of sorts.

"If Glenda thought that by running out of the office Eugene was indicating he wanted nothing more to do with her, she was mistaken. He was saving his resources for the campaign. He would not be put off, as he had been in the past. Her resistance had been showing signs of fatigue…having sensed this, he planned to wear her defenses down."

Now that might sound a bit over the top to some, but Eugene is a good guy at heart. Especially since while on a business trip to Chicago and reluctantly missing Eugene, Glenda asks herself, "[This] river must have been unpolluted once. Had she ever been?" The harsh wind presses in on her, and he only wants to be there to warm her up.

Will she let him settle within her borders? Take the journey along with them and discover for yourself.

***

Love and Other Hazards can be purchased at:
Amazon
Barnes and Noble
iTunes

Prices/Formats: $2.99 ebook, $14.95 paperback
Genre: Family Life, Romance
Pages: 256
Release: May 10, 2017
Publisher: River Grove
ISBN: 9781632991225
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About the Author

Claudia Riess is a Vassar graduate who has worked in the editorial departments of The New Yorker magazine and Holt, Rinehart and Winston books and has edited several art history monographs. Her first novel, “Reclining Nude,” was published by Stein and Day. Oliver Sacks, author of “Awakenings,” had said her first book was “exquisite—and delicate… a most courageous book, full of daring—a daring only possible to a passionate and pure heart.”

The author divides her time between the Hamptons and Manhattan with her husband, Bob.

Links to connect with Claudia:
Web Site
Facebook
Twitter
Goodreads
Blog Tour Site


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