Off Course, Michelle Huneven
Off Course, Michelle Huneven
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Off Course

Author: Michelle Huneven

Narrator: Amy Rubinate

Unabridged: 9 hr 5 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 04/16/2014


Synopsis

The year is 1981, Reagan is in the White House, and the country is stalled in a recession. Cressida Hartley, a gifted Ph.D. student in economics, moves into her parents' shabby A-frame cabin in the Sierras to write her dissertation.

Cress, increasingly resistant to her topic (art in the marketplace), allows herself to be drawn into the social life of the small mountain community. The exuberant local lodge owner, Jakey Yates, with his big personality and great animal magnetism, is the first to blur Cress' focus. The builder Rick Garsh gives her a job driving up and down the mountain for supplies. And then there are the two Morrow brothers, skilled carpenters, who are witty, intriguing, and married.

As Cress tells her best friend back home in Pasadena, being a single woman on the mountain amounts to a form of public service. Falling prey to her own perilous reasoning, she soon finds herself in dark new territory, subject to forces beyond her control from both within and without.

About Michelle Huneven

Michelle Huneven is the author of Blame, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Jamesland, which was a New York Times Notable Book and a winner of the Southern California Bookseller's Award for Fiction; and Round Rock. She received an MFA at the Iowa Writer's Workshop. For many years her "day job" was reviewing restaurants and writing about food for the Los Angeles Times, the LA Weekly, Gourmet, and other publications. Michelle lives in California with her husband.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Elyse on April 04, 2022

Everything about this novel sounded good to me from the get go: …..the title “Off Course”….(who can’t recall a time in one’s life when clearly going ‘off course’ left a major impact?)… .…..the photo of that ‘bear/woman/and bed’ is eye catching and seems to be saying a thousand words…(so intriguing)......more

Goodreads review by Edan on January 01, 2014

This book is so beautiful. Although I loved the prose and the setting from the beginning, its episodic style was hard to get into. I had a difficulty remembering who characters were, and sometimes the summarized nature made it hard to really feel invested in the heroine's, Cressida's, conflicts. But......more

Goodreads review by Jon on May 26, 2014

Growing up is a dirty business. It’s messy and uncertain, treacherous and humiliating. We greedily grab at the wrong things, or the wrong people. Along the way we become someone we don’t like, or even recognize. But if we’re persistent, and resiliant, and open to surprises, we may cobble together a......more

Goodreads review by Janet on December 26, 2014

This book may inspire a new shelf, a substratum of 'the love story', which is 'the mistress's story.' A young, but not too young, woman looking for something for more in her life, more fun, more juice, something to really matter, than her economics dissertation, which seems, the longer she waits to......more