Archives: Reviews

What readers are saying about Do I Know You?

“How easy it is to make mistakes that affect other people’s lives and leave too long to turn back the consequences. Welcome to Hassie’s world. Is she a victim of her own actions or driven to make wrong decisions by others? This second volume of the Hassie Calhoun trilogy is filled with memorable characters. This clever and occasionally frustrating journey shows true love and honesty comes in different forms.” ~Bryan Williams, Spain

“Wow! Pamela Cory’s Do I Know You? is a first-rate page-turner. The second of her trilogy continues an absorbing story of a talented woman beset with personal problems. The book takes place in the late 1970s and early 1980s as Hassie moves from her late twenties to her early forties. It feels authentic for those times and for its portrayal of a woman torn between career, love and motherhood.” ~ Nancy Stancill, NC

“The more mature Hassie is just as careless of other people’s feelings, but she is, perversely more likable, and Cory has surrounded her with a coterie of friends as complex as Hassie herself. Do I Know You? is an apt title for the second book of this trilogy. The author weaves a compelling tale with no simple resolution, and leaves us with tantalizing questions and veiled hints of what is to come.” ~ Kasey Latham, owner of Latham Editing, Charlotte, NC

Hassie Calhoun…readers and critics weigh in…

“Creating a protagonist who makes such self-destructive choices that you want to just get inside the book and slap some sense into her, yet at the same time making the reader love this character and want to keep reading is one of the most difficult tasks a novelist can undertake. Pamela Cory has succeeded brilliantly in doing just that with her simultaneously maddening and you-just-can’t-help-but-love-her character, Hassie Calhoun. Read this book and be transported to Las Vegas, circa 1959, along with one of the more engaging characters I’ve encountered in fiction.”

~ Karl Marlantes, author of Matterhorn and Deep River

“This novel is the real deal. Sin City in the sixties. Sinatra. JFK. A novel about a young woman trying to become a singing sensation.”

~K.G., reader

“Nostalgia takes it on the chin in Cory’s overdramatic but atmospherically leasing my debut…Cory’s alternatively gritty and sudsy depiction of early ’60s Sin City transports the reader back to a time when the Rat Pack ethos ruled.”

~Publisher’sWeekly

“Like its eponymous heroine, Hassie Calhoun proves to be deceptively plucky and resourceful. What easily could have devolved into an all-to-familiar cautionary tale of Las Vegas instead becomes a redemptive portrait of an era.”

~Adam Langer, author of The Thieves of Manhattan