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