num_pages: 240
description: For Susan Trott's Boston-born heroine, bigamy isn't all it's cracked up to be. Even though she's supposedly on the winning end! After only one month of marriage, 23-year-old Jane Croy (real name Effie Crackalbee) decides to leave the endlessly selfish Alan--a looker with a severe case of nonwriter's block--for the West Coast and a fearless new life. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately for Effie/Jane, she's sidetracked en route to San Francisco and ends up working as a nanny in the same Cape May village she's just fled. Determined to reinvent herself, she neglects to tell her new employer that she's married. Sexual attraction soon sets in and... Effie is by no means your average bigamist: she finds affirmation (not to mention duplicity) in decidedly unusual people and places. Though the humorless may occasionally find Effie's hijinks--and tai chi-induced highs--irritating, Trott has created a zesty and sporting protagonist. What's more, there are two intriguing (in both senses) minor characters, a literary agent, and a hugely successful ghostwriter, who give new meaning to the phrase the lies that bind. In a typically memorable one-liner, the latter declares, "I should write a book: Writers I have Known--And Been." --Barbara Brandeis
language: English
title: Crane Spread Wings
titlecomplete: Crane Spread Wings
ratings_count: 49
publisher: Doubleday