New Releases by Kathleen WINSOR

"There''s the nostalgia of an adult remembering childhood, with the intensity of its agonies. its emotions, its enchantment, its gradual awareness, in this new book by the author of Forever Amber. The span of a year spent on Laurel Avenue, on the edge of a Western town, gives Cassie Spangler, who leaves age 12 behind her, regretfully, a full measure of life. She and her small brother, Don, make their places with the gang quickly; Cassie and her pals are still experiencing the imaginary thrills of what they think being grown up will be, and sex is for them chance words overheard, an embarrassment over their parents'' affectionate interchanges, indignation when a young married couple quarrel openly, fleeting curiosity over what happened when two teen agers went too far and the girl''s family moved away, excitement when the sailor boy came home and claimed his girl, only to find she''d not stayed in the house alone in his absence, anger when death took a young mother-and her husband found another wife too soon. Cassie learns too something of what responsibility means- and faces another move, chin up. Almost a keyhole segment of America."--Kirkus

Explores the kinds of love that three women, driven by desire, find with the men of their choice. Winsor exposes the innermost secrets, dreams, torments, and raptures of women in love.

"This isn''t even good trash -- but the subway circuit will eat it up, and oh and ah over the inevitable resemblances ("purely coincidental") to the author and the success story that she lived. But what a cheap and tawdry tale it is, with all the in-and-out-of -bed aspects that distinguished Forever Amber, but with a modern setting, so that it seems less forgivable than when cloaked with distance and shrouded in costume decoration. In this case the "costume decoration" consists of the mink and ermine trappings of sudden wealth, the New York apartment done to the decorator''s most extravagant dream, and the men....She slays them with her beauty, does our heroine, who has written an historical first novel that rolls up a cool million or so. Written while she trails her husband during his navy training. Once it was finished, she had to get her emotional jags elsewhere than in her imagination, she filled the empty hours of his war years with men, and more men, -- a flier, a foreign correspondent, a misunderstood husband, all the stock characters, including her husband''s closest friends. When at the end, the still adoring husband is given a medical discharge, he finds the pace of her success story too rich for his self esteem, and walks out on her. But as the story ends, she is on her way to meet another potential victim.... And another novel is in the making. And she''s proved her own theory, -- "You can make a lot of money selling the public Love. Very little retail, but plenty wholesale". What she may not realize is that the author also proves something else her heroine says, "It''s just as difficult to get a bad idea as a good one." Difficult, perhaps, but it seems she has done it again. Amber Forever!"--Kirkus