From Publishers Weekly
In a collaborative effort inspired by a correspondence between the authors, Kay Darling explores the lives of three young and intermittently successful/happy characters. "My friends' lives are either ridiculously successful or on the verge of tragedy. Or both. Like mine." It combines laugh-out-loud passages with more sober chapters in which each character does a little soul searching as only twenty-somethings can. Kay is trying to write a screenplay, but is more successful at coming up with excuses to ignore it. Her sister, Claire, is trying to figure out who she is and what she is supposed to be doing with her life. Will is a hilariously cynical gay actor/writer on the verge of a breakthrough. Each character struggles with ambiguous desires: Will sells Kay's half-finished script to gain a role for himself, and Kay is just as happy when she is fired from the project; Claire is torn between relief and longing when she gets the negative results of her pregnancy test; Will can't quite come to grips with success and a thieving but beautiful boyfriend. Letters, stream-of-consciousness monologues, lines from Kay's screenplay, messages on an answering machine, all come together to give perfect insight into each person. Sister-sister, man-man, man-woman relationships are examined with authenticity, and readers will experience vicariously these hip, chaotic lives. Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Kirkus Review
Delightful, funny, real... uncover the twisted and hilarious souls of their characters without a hint of pretense or sentimentality.

LA Reader
The dialogue is brilliantly fresh ... When you finish the book, you might find yourself starting it again.

Vox
Duddy Kravitz can kiss my ass... Kay, Claire and Will is where it's at ... a great novel.

Book Description
An intelligent, fresh, witty look at how three twentysomethings live near the end of the 20th century, written in the ironic, sarcastic and sometimes cynical voices that have come to characterize a generation. A light sparkling and refreshing first novel that elucidates as artfully as it entertains ... The book's gutsy, unselfconscious realness makes it memorable long after the spine is stretched.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

What is it about a big city that makes people think they have to know everything? And everyone? What exactly are all those frantic urbanites up to anyway? So wonders Kay Pritchard, an uptight-straight-white-girl from New Brunswick, who is trying to finish a screenplay without losing her bottom-of-the-totem-pole job at the CBC. Meanwhile Claire, Kay's spirited but spiritually disorganized younger sister, is trying to complete her education, but keeps getting waylaid by smarty-pants Ph.D. students with Jean-Paul Sartre glasses, beautiful red-haired dykes with muscles and love-sick painters - not to mention the worry of a possible pregnancy. Then there's Will, a gay actor and Kay's long-time confidante, a talented young thing on the rise until he falls head over heels for a guy who looks "as if he's just fallen from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel." Told through letters, confessional monologues and stream-of-consciousness narratives, Kay Darling travels from Toronto to LA and back again on a funny, moving and lively trip through that time in your life when you're almost grown up, almost successful, and almost broke.

SYNOPSIS

An intelligent, fresh, witty look at how three twentysomethings live near the end of the 20th century, written in the ironic, sarcastic and sometimes cynical voices that have come to characterize a generation. A light sparkling and refreshing first novel that elucidates as artfully as it entertains ... The book's gutsy, unselfconscious realness makes it memorable long after the spine is stretched.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

Sister-sister, man-man, man-woman relationships are examined with authenticity and readers will experience vicariously these hip, chaotic lives.

Kirkus Review

Delightful, funny, real... uncover the twisted and hilarious souls of their characters without a hint of pretense or sentimentality.

LA Reader

The dialogue is brilliantly fresh ... When you finish the book, you might find yourself starting it again.

Publishers Weekly

In a collaborative effort inspired by a correspondence between the authors, Kay Darling explores the lives of three young and intermittently successful/happy characters. ``My friends' lives are either ridiculously successful or on the verge of tragedy. Or both. Like mine.'' It combines laugh-out-loud passages with more sober chapters in which each character does a little soul searching as only twenty-somethings can. Kay is trying to write a screenplay, but is more successful at coming up with excuses to ignore it. Her sister, Claire, is trying to figure out who she is and what she is supposed to be doing with her life. Will is a hilariously cynical gay actor/writer on the verge of a breakthrough. Each character struggles with ambiguous desires: Will sells Kay's half-finished script to gain a role for himself, and Kay is just as happy when she is fired from the project; Claire is torn between relief and longing when she gets the negative results of her pregnancy test; Will can't quite come to grips with success and a thieving but beautiful boyfriend. Letters, stream-of-consciousness monologues, lines from Kay's screenplay, messages on an answering machine, all come together to give perfect insight into each person. Sister-sister, man-man, man-woman relationships are examined with authenticity, and readers will experience vicariously these hip, chaotic lives. (Nov.)

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

Kay Darling is more than just a random collection of nouns and verbs. There are adjectives, pronouns, compound-complex sentences and a crackling good story... — Robert McKinney