The Way Life Should Be - Hardcover

Kline, Christina Baker

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0060798912 ISBN 13: 9780060798918

Publisher: William Morrow & Co, 2007

Synopsis

Feeling stuck in a routine personal life and unsatisfying career, thirty-three-year-old Angela pursues a seemingly idyllic online relationship with a sailing instructor from Maine, makes an impulsive decision to relocate, and learns important truths about understanding her own heart in finding true happiness. 15,000 first printing.

About this title

Review:

Kline has a perfect sense of character and timing. --Publishers Weekly"

[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"

A book about love and disappointment and risk and risotto, utterly appealing on every level. --Lauren Fox, author of Still Life with Husband"

A story about the way life really can be, with a little bit of luck and just the right seasoning. --Dani Shapiro"

An unassumingly beautiful story of human relationships and self-discovery...the ideal page-turning light read, with a tremendous payoff. --People"

"Kline has a perfect sense of character and timing."--Publishers Weekly

"[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

"A book about love and disappointment and risk and risotto, utterly appealing on every level."--Lauren Fox, author of Still Life with Husband

"A story about the way life really can be, with a little bit of luck and just the right seasoning."--Dani Shapiro

"An unassumingly beautiful story of human relationships and self-discovery...the ideal page-turning light read, with a tremendous payoff."--People

From the Back Cover:

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.

About this edition

• Publisher: William Morrow & Co
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0060798912
• ISBN 13: 9780060798918
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 274