Rating: 
Summary: Reading this for a book club
Review: I just finished The Sunday Wife and cannot say enough about it. I enjoyed every word and fell in love with the characters -- well, most of them anyway. I started reading it for the iParenting.com Book Club. Cassandra King will host a live chat the first week of December! I can't wait.
Rating: 
Summary: Entertaining but flawed
Review: All in all The Sunday Wife was an entertaining read. However, the two main characters (Augusta and Dean) seemed thrust together for no apparent reason in the beginning. I never understood why these two women could become such fast friends. Other than that, there were some surprising turns and twists and it certainly kept the story going at a good clip. Overall, a good book, but not the best.
Rating:
Summary: Learning to Be Who You Are
Review: This is a definite page turner! I had a very difficult time putting this book down every time I picked it up. This is the story of Dean Lynch, married twenty years to Ben Lynch, a very ambitious Methodist minister. After twenty years of being bullied and belittled by him, Dean and Ben move to Crystal Springs, a larger city in Northern Florida, with a very presitigious church. Dean is befriended by Augusta Holderfield, married to very prominent businessman Max Holderfield. Dean and Augusta become very close friends very quickly, much to the disgust of Ben. They champion various underdogs in the community, and slowly Dean is shunned by both Ben and the church congregation. With Augusta's help and encouragement, Dean begins to understand who she is and what is important to her. Her music brings solace and validity to her life. When tragedy strikes, it is her music that helps her recover. This is an amazing novel. The characters are well-rounded and real, and Ms. King makes the panhandle area of Florida come alive with beauty and charm. Definitely not a book to be missed!
Rating:
Summary: Really wonderful book
Review: I really enjoyed this book. It does a great job of portraying religion intolerance in the south of the US. A very good and engaging story. A great book for bookclub.
Rating:
Summary: The Sunday Wife is sure to become a best read of the year!
Review: THE SUNDAY WIFE is a compelling, moving, poignant novel that speaks to the vicissitudes of marriage, the ebb and flow of friendships, the delicate balance of maintaining one's integrity in a small community, and the necessity of claiming those things that make each of us a whole self. Cassandra King's second novel is so near perfect that it reads like a symphony, each note following the other in perfect pitch. In Dean, the narrator, she has created a character who is at times funny, sad, ridiculous, pitiful, strong, talented and inspiring. On the one hand, she represents the plight of too many women trapped in lives of quiet desperation; and on the flip side, she is so full of life and love that we can't help but cheer her on as she makes her way across the canvas of her life. Dean is married to Ben, an ambitious Methodist preacher who, for more then 20 years, has taken his wife for granted. Early in their marriage he cast her in the narrow, circumscribed role of a pastor's wife, never once consulting her about anything. To his way of thinking, only his selfish, self-serving needs coupled with the expectations his parishioners project onto her are all she needs in her life. She is a woman of low self-esteem who has deferred to his whims and strong will all of her married life --- until he is promoted to a new parish in Crystal Springs, Florida. "With the moving van a few minutes behind us, we pulled our cars, me following Ben --- a metaphor for our life together --- into the driveway of our new house." A few weeks after settling in, Dean meets Augusta Holderfield, a rich, flamboyant, rebellious rule breaker and falls under her spell. As the novel unfolds around this oddly matched pair of women, King introduces us to the movers and shakers of Ben's new congregation: the gossips and troublemakers whose lives revolve around petty disputes and childish backstabbing. Of course, Dean pays dearly for her deep friendship with and dependence on the notorious Augusta. When the two women, who are outcasts by nature, take a Gypsy fortuneteller named Celeste under their wing, the reputations of all three are blackened as they are infamously linked together. SUNDAY WIFE is a beautifully crafted novel; the prose is clear, the characters are extraordinarily limned, the situations so realistic that readers will think they are reading about themselves or their neighbors. We all know people who resemble the characters in SUNDAY WIFE; which is one of the most intriguing elements of the book. One can only hope that Cassandra King is already working on the sequel. Enjoy this wonderful book, which is sure to become one of your best reads this year. --- Reviewed by Barbara Lipkien Gershenbaum
Rating: 
Summary: Predictable
Review: I was very interested in reading THE SUNDAY WIFE for three major reasons: It is written by Pat Conroy's wife and I love Pat Conroy novels; I'm the daughter of a Methodist minister and was interested in how this played into the plot; I'm from Florida. Well, it turns out those were three pretty lousy reasons for reading a book. Oh, I read it. I guess primarily because it was kind of interesting to read the references to familiar things. The church ladies were certainly familiar. If Cassandra King isn't a minister's daughter or former minister's wife, she sure had an inside view to what goes on in the parsonage. The descriptions of Florida were good too. But the plot was predictable and overly complicated for something that just wasn't that difficult. It wasn't a bad story, but for my tastes it needed to be better edited. There were too many details about things that just didn't matter. I want to know what the people are thinking and feeling, not about how long the trip is between Sarasota and Crystal River. But we got both and sometimes not enough of the thinking and feeling. Ben Lynch, Dean's self-centered minister husband was so one-dimensional that there were times I wondered why he was even in this story. Don't read this if you want good southern fiction. I'm sorry to say, it's not.
Rating: 
Summary: Social agenda
Review: This book read like a first novel. Shallow predictable characters, predictable plot. It would have been better, too if the social agenda were not so obvious. The book feels like it was created tmerely to bash men, marriages and religion. The protagonist is too much of a victim to make her interesting, but I found the gay couple quite charming sympathic characters.
Rating:
Summary: Great Book!
Review: After reading the rave review in "People" magazine, I had to go get this book, and they were right! Ladies, if you ever got sick and tired of that no-good husband of yours and felt like you had to change your life before you went nuts, this is for you. Men, if want to know what makes women tick...get this book and read it twice! I look forward to whatever Cassandra King puts out in the future...she has a new fan!
Rating:
Summary: Great fiction!
Review: Great fiction! However, it could be a true story. As a Methodist from Alabama, many of the characters and situations in The Sunday Wife seem very realistic. "Men of the Cloth" often are not really what they project from the pulpit, just ask their family members. Having read King's earlier novel, Making Waves in Zion, I looked forward to this new novel. I was not disappointed. I will recommend the book to my friends. She is a gifted author and I hope she writes many more books.
Rating:
Summary: Pass on this one
Review: This book was disappointing. The plot was predictable, nothing new here. The affair between Dean and Maddox didn't fit in with the character's personalities. I wanted to feel a strong dislike for Dean's husband and for Libby but I never did. Mostly I just didn't care about any of these characters. Waste of time...
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