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The Goddesses of Kitchen Avenue

A Novel

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The Goddesses of Kitchen Avenue

By: Barbara O'Neal
Narrated by: Carly Robins, Kim Staunton, Allyson Johnson, Susan Dalian
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Four women face the turning points of their lives in a warm and wise novel about choices and second chances by the USA Today bestselling author of When We Believed in Mermaids.

A loving wife and a mother of three accomplished children, forty-six-year-old Trudy Marino has an uncomplicated life—until she’s blindsided by her husband’s affair. But in Trudy’s close-knit neighborhood, she’s not alone in navigating the sudden surprises in a woman’s life.

Her neighbor Roberta has just lost her husband of sixty-two years and struggles with bittersweet memories and grief. Roberta’s granddaughter Jade is a divorcée who has taken up a cathartic new hobby to get over her cheating ex. And there’s Shannelle, whose creative aspirations are fracturing her marriage.

Then Trudy meets Angel, a sensual young man with the vulnerable heart of a poet who awakens her to invigorating new sensations. With a bracing confidence and three dear friends coming together in confusion, anger, and hope, Trudy is encouraged to take control of her life, to reflect on the choices she didn’t make, and to fulfill the youthful dreams she abandoned. As a new world opens up, Trudy can only marvel at where to go from here.

Revised edition: This edition of The Goddesses of Kitchen Avenue includes editorial revisions.

©2004, 2014, 2024 by Barbara Samuel. (P)2021 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved.
Fiction Women's Fiction Marriage Heartfelt
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Critic reviews

“A robust cast delivers a dynamic performance of this slice-of-life story. [Trudy] bonds with four eccentric women from Kitchen Avenue.… Though each woman is portrayed by a single narrator, creating personal connections with listeners, this doesn't overshadow the overall relationship among them.”AudioFile Magazine

“[O’Neal’s] writing is, quite simply, splendid. . . . These women are as familiar as your next-door neighbor and as exotic as the goddesses who archetype their lives. [O’Neal] soars with genius in the humanity of her storytelling.”–BookPage

“Warmhearted . . . [O’Neal’s] characters are warmly drawn and sympathetic, their problems real and believable.”–Publishers Weekly

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Most relevant
This has been a wonderful book. There is so much, I feel, still to come. If I have any misgivings that's it. The stories are incomplete.
That of course could be the point. We, the readers/listeners decide where each character goes.
I've always enjoyed writing extra chapters and used this as a teacher when teaching English composition. The children loved creating different endings or rewriting a characters reactions.
Who knows.
That said, this is a beautiful book, full of interesting facts and more than one 'Oh no!' moments. Being a female divorcee I related strongly to some of the behaviours within the text, as well as those of one or two of the characters, male and female.
There's so much to love in this book so take the leap. You won't regret it.

A vision of woman

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