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On page 7 of Anyone But Her, we hear these exact words (“anyone but her”) spoken by Alex, mom of Suzanne, the novel’s main character. Six months earlier, Alex was killed during an armed robbery of her record store on Colfax Avenue in Denver. Now, she appears as a ghost to 14-year-old Suzanne, a clairvoyant, and urges Suzanne to intervene in the relationship between Suzanne’s father James, and his girlfriend, Peggy, whom he’d dated in high school. Alex explains that after meeting Peggy at James and Peggy’s high school reunion, she’d jokingly told him that if she died, he could marry “anyone but her.”
Lost in grief and loneliness, Suzanne heeds her mother’s warnings and does what she can to break up James and Peggy. The repercussions of this decision are severe and long-lasting, both when Suzanne is a teen in 1979, and in 2004, twenty-five years later, when she returns to...[read on]
The Page 69 Test: The Bookseller.
The Page 69 Test: The Glass Forest.
Writers Read: Cynthia Swanson (February 2018).
Q&A with Cynthia Swanson.
--Marshal Zeringue
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