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Saluting the Sun
FOREWORDINDIES BOOK OF THE YEAR FINALIST
Who is safer, a 23-year-old woman who plays the glass harmonica on the streets of New Orleans and lives in a commune-style house with other free spirits, con artists and petty thieves like herself, or a rising television weathercaster who resides in a luxury high rise in Chicago with her emotionally volatile husband? When Nevaeh Thera gives up her street life to live with her cousin, star meteorologist Dawn Ann McKnight and her photographer husband, Derek Baldwin, a life-threatening truth is exposed and both women learn that you can’t start over, but you can start again.
Who is safer, a 23-year-old woman who plays the glass harmonica on the streets of New Orleans and lives in a commune-style house with other free spirits, con artists and petty thieves like herself, or a rising television weathercaster who resides in a luxury high rise in Chicago with her emotionally volatile husband? When Nevaeh Thera gives up her street life to live with her cousin, star meteorologist Dawn Ann McKnight and her photographer husband, Derek Baldwin, a life-threatening truth is exposed and both women learn that you can’t start over, but you can start again.
260 pages, Unknown Binding
First published February 11, 2015
1 person is currently reading
189 people want to read
About the author
Mary Hutchings Reed
17 books17 followersEver since turning 40 a few years ago, Mary has been trying to become harder to introduce, and, at 66, she finds she’s been succeeding. Her conventional resume includes thirty nine years of practicing law, first with Sidley & Austin and then with Winston & Strawn, two of the largest firms in Chicago. She was a partner at both in the advertising, trademark, copyright, entertainment
and sports law areas, and retired February 1, 2015. She continues to write, do community service and pursue hobbies such as golf, sailing, tennis and bridge. Three of Mary's four novels have been ForewordINDIES Book of the Year Awards Fianalists.
Mary was raised in Crystal Lake, Illinois, then a small town forty five miles from Chicago. Her mother was a librarian and her father a PhD in chemical engineering, and that should explain everything. She has one sister, Donna C. Steele, born eleven months and two weeks after her, who skipped first grade so that the “Hutchings girls” were very much like twins—Donna the creative one (the Founder and Artistic Director of Steel Beam Theatre, St. Charles, IL) and Mary the logical one, and that should explain the rest of it!
She attended Prospect High School in Mt. Prospect, Illinois, where she loved being editor-in-chief of the school newspaper and on the speech events team, but was happy to graduate and move on to Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. She is “ever true to Brown” and grateful for lifelong friends she met there, as well as the intellectual encouragement she received from an inspirational faculty. She received both her bachelors (in public policymaking, an interdisciplinary program) and her masters (in economics) in four years, graduating Phi Beta Kappa in 1973. She then entered Yale Law School (having just missed the Clintons), where she won second prize in the Moot Court of Appeals competition–(“My husband doesn’t really believe in women in law,” one of the judge’s wives told her afterwards)–and chaired the Moot Court Board in her last year. She joined Sidley & Austin in 1976 and was elected to partner in 1983. Winston & Strawn recruited her in 1989 to help start their intellectual property department.
Mary married William R. Reed, an internist, in 1982. They just celebrated twenty five wonderful years together. It’s his fault she’s now a writer. In 1992, Mary took a leave of absence from law to sail from Norfolk, Va. to St. Thomas, U.S.V.I. with Bill in a 32 foot boat. (See Mary’s book, Captain Aunt), which took 22 days and nights. After three storms at sea and a few weeks of recovery at anchor in the Caribbean, Mary resigned her partnership in order to reduce her workload and refocus some of her energy on writing. She began to write every day and to study with Enid Powell in Chicago and Fred Shafer in Evanston. She has attended numerous writing conferences around the country, including
Breadloaf (Middlebury, Vermont), Tin House (Portland, Oregon) and Words and Music (New Orleans).
Mary's fiction has been honored as a finalist in the following competitions: William Wisdom/William Faulkner; Illinois Library Associaation's Soon to Be Famous author Project; Foreword Reviews' IndieFab; Eric Hoffer; Writers' Digest Self-Published, Florida Review Editors' Prize, and many others.
Mary and Bill have a new, smaller sailboat, If, still ocean-worthy, which they occasionally cruise up Lake Michigan and which they hope to take to salt water some time soon.
Mary also believes in community service, and for many years has served on the boards of various nonprofit organizations, including American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois, YWCA of Metropolitan Chicago, Off the Street Club and the Chicago Bar Foundation. She was honored as LAF's 2015 "Champion for Justice" by Chicago's Legal Assistance Foundation. She also sits on the board of her longest-standing service involvement, Lawyers for the Creative Arts. Her past three indie novels all benefit causes that Mary is passionate
and sports law areas, and retired February 1, 2015. She continues to write, do community service and pursue hobbies such as golf, sailing, tennis and bridge. Three of Mary's four novels have been ForewordINDIES Book of the Year Awards Fianalists.
Mary was raised in Crystal Lake, Illinois, then a small town forty five miles from Chicago. Her mother was a librarian and her father a PhD in chemical engineering, and that should explain everything. She has one sister, Donna C. Steele, born eleven months and two weeks after her, who skipped first grade so that the “Hutchings girls” were very much like twins—Donna the creative one (the Founder and Artistic Director of Steel Beam Theatre, St. Charles, IL) and Mary the logical one, and that should explain the rest of it!
She attended Prospect High School in Mt. Prospect, Illinois, where she loved being editor-in-chief of the school newspaper and on the speech events team, but was happy to graduate and move on to Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. She is “ever true to Brown” and grateful for lifelong friends she met there, as well as the intellectual encouragement she received from an inspirational faculty. She received both her bachelors (in public policymaking, an interdisciplinary program) and her masters (in economics) in four years, graduating Phi Beta Kappa in 1973. She then entered Yale Law School (having just missed the Clintons), where she won second prize in the Moot Court of Appeals competition–(“My husband doesn’t really believe in women in law,” one of the judge’s wives told her afterwards)–and chaired the Moot Court Board in her last year. She joined Sidley & Austin in 1976 and was elected to partner in 1983. Winston & Strawn recruited her in 1989 to help start their intellectual property department.
Mary married William R. Reed, an internist, in 1982. They just celebrated twenty five wonderful years together. It’s his fault she’s now a writer. In 1992, Mary took a leave of absence from law to sail from Norfolk, Va. to St. Thomas, U.S.V.I. with Bill in a 32 foot boat. (See Mary’s book, Captain Aunt), which took 22 days and nights. After three storms at sea and a few weeks of recovery at anchor in the Caribbean, Mary resigned her partnership in order to reduce her workload and refocus some of her energy on writing. She began to write every day and to study with Enid Powell in Chicago and Fred Shafer in Evanston. She has attended numerous writing conferences around the country, including
Breadloaf (Middlebury, Vermont), Tin House (Portland, Oregon) and Words and Music (New Orleans).
Mary's fiction has been honored as a finalist in the following competitions: William Wisdom/William Faulkner; Illinois Library Associaation's Soon to Be Famous author Project; Foreword Reviews' IndieFab; Eric Hoffer; Writers' Digest Self-Published, Florida Review Editors' Prize, and many others.
Mary and Bill have a new, smaller sailboat, If, still ocean-worthy, which they occasionally cruise up Lake Michigan and which they hope to take to salt water some time soon.
Mary also believes in community service, and for many years has served on the boards of various nonprofit organizations, including American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois, YWCA of Metropolitan Chicago, Off the Street Club and the Chicago Bar Foundation. She was honored as LAF's 2015 "Champion for Justice" by Chicago's Legal Assistance Foundation. She also sits on the board of her longest-standing service involvement, Lawyers for the Creative Arts. Her past three indie novels all benefit causes that Mary is passionate
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
March 27, 2015
Saluting the Sun
Mary Reed Hutchings
Ampersand, Inc.
Review by Barbara Bamberger Scott
Early on in this engaging, fast-paced novel, the main character, Nevaeh (that’s heaven spelled backwards) has found her way from the rapidly approaching winter of Prairie du Chien where she and her erstwhile lover and partner in minor crime were living in a tree house, to the warm but crooked streets of New Orleans, where she will encounter Phillipé The Phabulous, and they will make beautiful music together with wineglasses, “soft on the air like the coo of a morning dove.” Meanwhile, in the more aggressive, icier atmosphere of Chicago local television, Nevaeh’s distant cousin Dawn Ann struggles to move up in the weathercasting world while her ne’er-do-anything husband Derek is harboring dangerous secrets in his darkroom.
How Nevaeh and Dawn’s two opposing lives will collide—the one woman spontaneous and a little fast and loose with the truth, men and drugs, the other a straight-arrow coiffed confection trying to deny the ugly situation developing at home while keeping up a front on the current weather front—is all in the deft hands of novelist Mary Reed Hutchings, in this her third published fiction work (Courting Kathleen Hannigan, Warming Up). We watch with dismay as the hippie girl with the college degree goes farther down the road to nowhere, seeming set to squander all by loving the boy or the bottle she’s with. We wonder with frustration how long it will take the denying Dawn Ann to realize that her photographer husband isn’t going to become famous, and there are signs he may be on the road to becoming notorious—as a wife-beater.
When Nevaeh is finally forced to reach out to her more responsible, grown-up relative, and Dawn Ann finds the prospect of having some family around strangely comforting (not anticipating some of the more disturbing effects this will have on hubby), stuff happens fast for both females. A cozy home life turns horribly sour, misunderstandings proliferate, and were it not for a good friend (for Dawn Ann) and a long lost piece of her past making a surprising reappearance (for Nevaeh), much, if not all, might be lost.
In a story that moves from Iowa to Louisiana, from Key West to Chicago, reporting the inner and outer temperature readings on two someday-to-be-powerful women, we learn that “the elements” can have a strong influence on personalities, and that heaven spelled backwards is not hell, but just a less angelic and equally desirable place to reside.
Mary Reed Hutchings
Ampersand, Inc.
Review by Barbara Bamberger Scott
Early on in this engaging, fast-paced novel, the main character, Nevaeh (that’s heaven spelled backwards) has found her way from the rapidly approaching winter of Prairie du Chien where she and her erstwhile lover and partner in minor crime were living in a tree house, to the warm but crooked streets of New Orleans, where she will encounter Phillipé The Phabulous, and they will make beautiful music together with wineglasses, “soft on the air like the coo of a morning dove.” Meanwhile, in the more aggressive, icier atmosphere of Chicago local television, Nevaeh’s distant cousin Dawn Ann struggles to move up in the weathercasting world while her ne’er-do-anything husband Derek is harboring dangerous secrets in his darkroom.
How Nevaeh and Dawn’s two opposing lives will collide—the one woman spontaneous and a little fast and loose with the truth, men and drugs, the other a straight-arrow coiffed confection trying to deny the ugly situation developing at home while keeping up a front on the current weather front—is all in the deft hands of novelist Mary Reed Hutchings, in this her third published fiction work (Courting Kathleen Hannigan, Warming Up). We watch with dismay as the hippie girl with the college degree goes farther down the road to nowhere, seeming set to squander all by loving the boy or the bottle she’s with. We wonder with frustration how long it will take the denying Dawn Ann to realize that her photographer husband isn’t going to become famous, and there are signs he may be on the road to becoming notorious—as a wife-beater.
When Nevaeh is finally forced to reach out to her more responsible, grown-up relative, and Dawn Ann finds the prospect of having some family around strangely comforting (not anticipating some of the more disturbing effects this will have on hubby), stuff happens fast for both females. A cozy home life turns horribly sour, misunderstandings proliferate, and were it not for a good friend (for Dawn Ann) and a long lost piece of her past making a surprising reappearance (for Nevaeh), much, if not all, might be lost.
In a story that moves from Iowa to Louisiana, from Key West to Chicago, reporting the inner and outer temperature readings on two someday-to-be-powerful women, we learn that “the elements” can have a strong influence on personalities, and that heaven spelled backwards is not hell, but just a less angelic and equally desirable place to reside.
goodreads-win
May 19, 2015Goodreads win. Will read and review once received.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews