Strings Attached: Book 1 of the Venus as She Ages Collection

In her first novel Gay Walley weaves two stories into a seamless narrative - a womans quest for love and the drunken vagabond childhood she endured with her father.Raised on a barstool Charlee spends her youth drinking in the dark dives of New England and Montreal with a father who flees from woman to woman. As an adult in one of her fathers haunts she encounters the man whose flaws and attractions will make her face every emotion that confounded her dad. She longs for companionship but from her father she has learned to trust only her own will and crave solitude. Can she overcome a life of defiant independence and her distrust of affection?Walleys daring prose style allows the writer to make Charlees rough but endearing past immediate and vital in her present.I often think the truth Charlee supposes was that my father lost me in a card game. He was losing; indeed he lost everything. The men are all sitting around the bar and this card game is a secret all-consuming vice of my fathers. He will do anything to keep in the game. And he says Okay Ive got nothing except my daughter. When shes eighteen you can have her. You can take her and do whatever the hell you like.Populated with tough brilliant characters who crisscross New England Strings Attached is a novel about the search for love about the possibilities and impossibilities of that quest. Walley says These searching characters fall away and toward each other as we do in every love affair and come to their ultimate truths.