Family Acts
A Novel
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- $5.99
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
Louise Shaffer follows her beloved novels The Three Miss Margarets and The Ladies of Garrison Gardens with an unforgettable tale of poignancy, wit, and high drama.
Katie Harder and Randa Jennings live on opposite coasts, have never met, and have almost nothing in common–except that they’re both named after Shakespearean characters. Everything Katie has ever done or possessed–her New York City co-op, her career as a writer for a daytime drama–was given to her by her late mother, in her day a flamboyant soap opera queen. Randa, on the other hand, has escaped the trappings of a difficult past and forged a life as a single mom, juggling her work as a Hollywood business manager with the needs of her precocious eleven-year-old daughter.
Life takes an unpredictable turn for these two strangers when they jointly inherit the century-old Venable Opera House, a stately but run-down theater in small-town Georgia. Puzzled at this peculiar legacy, Katie and Randa are at first eager to unload their white elephant. But as they spend more time in the old theater, they come to realize that a rich heritage is at stake. A line of strong women–starting with Juliet Venable in the late nineteenth century–has been responsible for keeping the grand old place up and running. In the face of huge obstacles, including a dying theater culture and their own personal struggles, these singular women have gone to drastic measures to keep the opera house in the family–including burying a devastating family secret that could destroy the carefully cultivated Venable legend forever.
Now, as a local contractor seeks to tear down the landmark, Katie and Randa must decide not only if they want to unravel their mysterious connection to the theater and maintain its tradition but if they have what it takes to keep the Venable family legacy alive.
A sprawling page-turner about maintaining family honor and lifelong dreams, Family Acts is Louise Shaffer’s most powerful and assured novel to date.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Shaffer's delightful third novel, lifelong New Yorker Katharine "Katie" Harder works listlessly as a script writer on the same show that made her deceased mother, Rosalind Harder, a soap opera legend. Miranda "Randa" Jennings is an obsessive Hollywood business manager determined to make childhood better for her 11-year-old daughter, Susie, than her actor father made it for her. When each learns she has inherited a mysterious property, high-strung Miranda and second-guessing Katie both head to sleepy Massonville, Ga., to discover that they are mutual beneficiaries of a falling-apart theater known as the Venable opera house. Despite their skepticism, both become intrigued with the stories the theater holds and wonder if they are in fact related, especially when they hear how the Venable family "always named their children after characters in Shakespeare's plays" as both women are. Shaffer (The Three Miss Margarets) then rolls back to the beginning of the Venable dynasty, and Randa and Katie struggle with a potential sale to a ruthless developer. While some plot points, including an abrupt, too-tidy ending, are as worn as the opera house floor, Randa and Katie's self-discoveries are sweet, fast-paced and full of heart.