Cassandra Edwards is a graduate student at Berkeley: gay brilliant nerve-racked miserable.
At the beginning of this novel she drives back to her family ranch in the foothills of the
Sierras to attend the wedding of her identical twin Judith to a nice young doctor from
Connecticut. Cassandra however is hell-bent on sabotaging the wedding. Dorothy Baker s
entrancing tragicomic novella follows an unpredictable course of events in which her heroine
appears variously as conniving self-aware pitiful frenzied absurd and heartbroken at once
utterly impossible and tremendously sympathetic. As she struggles to come to terms with the
only life she has Cassandra reckons with her complicated feelings about the sister who she
feels owes it to her to be her alter ego with her father a brandy-soaked retired professor of
philosophy and with the ghost of her dead mother. First published in 1962 Cassandra at the
Wedding is a book of enduring freshness insight and verve. Like the fiction of Jeffrey
Eugenides and Jhumpa Lahiri it is the work of a master stylist with a profound understanding
of the complexities of the heart and mind.
