A Shooting Star

I read and discussed this book years ago when I first retired. I had signed up through a local community college emeritus class that discussed books and also included local author visits. This class was what encouraged me to go to my local library and offer my services to facilitate a Library Discus......more

Wallace Stegner has been an uneven novelist for this reader. I first read his 1943 historical The Big Rock Candy Mountain, a book I could not put down. The Preacher and the Slave, about Joe Hill and the Wobblies was also riveting. A couple others left me either bored or less than enraptured. He was......more

Definitely my least favorite book by Stegner. It's the story of a woman, Sabrina Castro, who is married to a doctor but is frustrated by his busy schedule and feels neglected. She has an affair on the side and decides she wants to leave her marriage and drives all night from her home in Pasadena to......more

Wallace Stegner's best work as a novelist (excepting "The Big Rock Candy Mountain," certainly in his top four) came after age 57; the proof is in the awards ("Angle of Repose," Pulitzer Prize, 1971; "The Spectator Bird," National Book Award, six years later) and in critical consensus. "A Shooting St......more

Sabrina Castro is the wealthy and attractive wife of a Pasadena physician and also the offspring of a transplanted New England family that found wealth but never a sense of purpose. Life begins to unravel for Sabrina after twelve years of childless marriage as a "trophy" wife when she takes a vacati......more