Where Love Goes

By Joyce Maynard

Book Overview

Claire is pushing forty with a short stick. She's divorced and raising two teenagers in a small town where just about everybody else is married. Claire longs for companionship, romance, and passion. She's tried blind dates, answered the personals. She's still looking. When Claire meets Tim - also divorced, struggling to raise his own daughter, Ursula - she believes she's found the perfect partner and lover. But as Tim and Claire work toward joining their families and building an intimate life together, their families clash in a never-ending battle for attention and affection: Ursula resents Claire, and Claire's children hate Ursula. When Ursula wreaks a unique and deadly vengeance on everyone, her mother suddenly shows up after a two-year absence and both families spin out of control. I used to think you and I could make a family together, Claire tells Tim. Now I feel I'm losing the family I had. Where Love Goes is a poignant and stirring story about a woman's brave attempt to remake her life. Maynard writes realistically - at times comically, at times lyrically - about the issues women deal with today: the conflict between sexuality and domesticity, how to be a good enough mother and still survive professionally, and how to find passion and enduring love along the way.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0517701774
• ISBN13: 9780517701775
• Release Date: August 1995
• Publisher: Crown
• Length: 338 Pages
• Weight: 1.44 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.5" x 1.3" x 6.3"

Customer Reviews

Oprah, please consider for your next book club selection!

Consider "Where Love Goes", one of my very favorite books. Similar to the television program "Once and Again", it involved two divorced people who each have kids, who fall madly madly madly in love, and attempt to blend their awkward, hostile families. The parents are on cloud nine, the kids loathe each other - non-hilarity results! The relationships are mercilessly examined in minute detail, with often toe-curling reactions in the reader. Anyone who has kids, who has fallen in love with someone with their own kids, ought to read this book to get a clue as to what the not-in-love kids feel about the whole thing. It will make you think twice about remarriage. The writing, of course, is what makes this book so good, you grow to feel deeply for all of the characters just as if they were real people you knew. Or at least people on TV! There's much to be said for waiting until the kids are out on their own before giving into one's private bliss. A very, very good book, I'm re-reading it for the third time.

A very enjoyable book!

A spirited, fun and engaging story about love, sex and parenting. Claire felt like a friend and I truly cared about her happiness. This novel was altogether satisfying! Thank you, Joyce Maynard!

Touching and finely crafted

I loved this book. It will remain in my library to be savored at a later date. Maynard is an author to contend with, and I would like to see another novel from her hands soon.

It got inside my heart.

I loved this book and can not wait to read more by this author. The characters came alive and I laughed and cried with them. But mostly I am glad I have worked through all the problems of marriage and will celebrate my 35th anniversary this summer. My children are emotionally healthy and so are my 5 grandchildren.

very well-written, very romantic (in parts)...

touching, too . . . i really could "feel" for the characters, and what they were going through . . . now want to read more books by the author!