Cassandra at the Wedding

author
Dorothy Baker

plot synopsis in 50 words or fewer
Cassandra Edwards, a brilliant, intense Berkeley Grad. student, returns to her family's ranch in the foothills of the Sierras to attend and hopefully sabotage her identical twin sister's wedding.

what really matters
how freakishly good this book is. Baker's brilliance (and make no mistake, it can only be thus described) is her ability to create a protagonist and, for two thirds of the book, narrator whose emotional multidimensionality continues to reveal itself throughout the entire course of the novel. And while Cassandra becomes more and more complex in her exposure, Baker's writing makes her character effortlessly whole, vivid, and utterly real. Also, the writing, like the protagonists, is brilliant and funny as hell. Cassandra is totally nuts and incredibly sympathetic—and you will be completely enraptured by her.
This is a book like no other on the planet and you will devour it as if it were the last one out there.

here's a taste to get you all riled up (p.s. Jane is Cassandra's dead mother.)
"Yes?" I heard my grandmother say. It's what she says instead of hello, and I've never understood exactly what she means by it, so I always ask. Jane always asked too. I got it from her.
"Yes what?" I said. It should have identified me but it didn't, and she repeated the question, if it was one, and I dealt directly.
"Granny, this is Cassie," I said.
"Whom?" she said.
"Not whom," I said. "Who. Who this is is Cassandra Edwards. Of Berkeley California."
"Just a minute," she said and I heard her say: "Jim, it's Berkeley, I'm afraid something has happened to Cassie."
"No no," I called, don't talk to papa, talk to me." But I said it to nobody and a moment later I heard another aside, still from my grandmother, "Just get a towel," she said, "and come to the phone."

other people who liked this book (or at least say they did)
Carson McCullers ("I—whose usual bed time is ten o'clock—stayed up all night reading that exquisite Cassandra at the Wedding—dazzled by the pyrotechnics of such an artist.")

Georgia Hammick ("Belongs with Salinger's Catcher in the Rye and McCullers' Member of the Wedding as a modern American classic.")

The New York Times ("A brilliantly told story...remarkably subtle...inexorably lucid.")

some other things this author has written
Young Man With a Horn
Trio