Late Night Dancing — Diana Silber

his is a novel about love and change, loneliness and guilt, but most importantly about the power and fragility of friendship. Cassie, Eve, and Nona are single, sophisticated, and forty-something. They are bonded together by their need for caring in a world of men who have betrayed and deserted them. Cassie, reliable doctor and mother, mourns a dead marriage. Hard-edged Eve fights memories of "the bear," an older professor she seduced and loved with ruthless, disastrous passion. Nona, who can get any man she wants, is locked away in an emotionally frigid world from which she refuses to escape. Silber drowns her characters in emotional prose so thick it becomes at times difficult to keep track of basics like time and place. Nevertheless, she refuses to settle for the simple and the cliched with this involving, heart-wrenching novel that is a cut above the average.