From Publishers Weekly
This follow-up to Allen’s Fresh Air reintroduces Lucinda Hunter, a recovering agoraphobe, successful screenwriter and popular movie reviewer who grew up in her film star mother’s shadow. After discovering the truth about her absentee father’s interracial background, Lucinda devotes considerable time to connecting with her long-lost family. Inexplicably, Lucinda’s elderly Aunt Anne, a prim, skeletal fashionista, treats her with contempt and grows exceedingly possessive of the time Lucinda spends with Anne’s aged mother. Allen spends a lot of time on this family conflict, and the plot line drags. As Lucinda grapples with her newfound family and complicated past, she also struggles with crippling self-image issues resulting from the double mastectomy she underwent as a teenager. Allen takes great pains to realistically convey the transformation in Lucinda’s life when she takes an interest in her paternal grandmother’s physician, and she portrays the budding romance with delicate sensitivity. Lucinda also develops a friendly relationship with Jason, the young boy who lives next door with his troubled mother, and strengthens her bond with Katanya, the Fresh Air Fund camper who captivated her in the previous book. But the story goes awry when Allen employs the events of September 11th to drive the story forward; for those affected by the day’s terrible events, this manipulation might leave a bitter aftertaste amidst the happily ever after ending.Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
Popular author Allen continues the story she launched in Fresh Air [BKL My 1 03] featuring Lucinda Hunter, a Connecticut woman in her forties who has long suffered from severe agoraphobia. Lucinda's life began to open up when she met Katanya, a young girl from Harlem sent to the country by the Fresh Air Fund, and they have remained close as Katanya becomes an outspoken teenager and Lucinda discovers her deceased father's African American family. Lucinda relishes contact with her "new" relatives, especially her aged grandmother. She is determined to spend as much time as she possibly can baby-sitting the neighbor's precocious child and visiting with friends and family, and then she meets her grandmother's doctor, Eli Carter. He is also of mixed heritage, but she is very uncomfortable with the attraction she feels for him since she hasn't been involved with a man since she was 19. Just as Lucinda seems to be making progress, the tragedy of September 11, 2001, radically changes her life and perspective. Once again, Allen offers readers moving insights into the heart and mind of a woman rediscovering the world with the help of a loving family and friends. Patty Engelmann
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Book Description
After years of self-imposed, fearful reclusiveness inside her home, Lucinda Hunter has started moving out into the world. She has found her family and her isolation has ended, largely thanks to Katanya Taylor, who ventured into her garden five years earlier and beckoned to Lucinda to come outside. Now a feisty, somewhat irreverent teenager, Katanya comes with her mother and grandmother to spend weekends with Lucinda -- their initial connection stronger than ever. Everything is going well. Yet Lucinda feels an urgent anxiety, fearful that she will never have sufficient time to spend with her own very elderly grandmother, that she will never be able to absorb all the details of her family history. She is racing against time. Yet she is happier than she's been since childhood. And meeting Eli Carter, her grandmother's doctor, presents an unexpected and challenging set of new circumstances. Then, on September 11, 2001, the world is cataclysmically changed. In the aftermath, faced with the shattering repercussions that affect everyone and everything Lucinda knows, she is pulled, finally, entirely, into a new reality. With insightful sensitivity Charlotte Vale Allen explores the hearts and minds of Lucinda, her friends and family as they grapple with the terrible upheaval in their lives as a result of a single day's events.

About the Author
New York Times bestselling author Charlotte Vale Allen worked (among other things) as a salesperson, a waitress, a secretary, an insurance broker and as an actress and singer before turning to writing full-time with the publication of her first novel, Love Life, in 1976. Born in Toronto, Canada, Allen moved to the U.S. in 1966 and has lived in Connecticut since 1970. Her award-winning autobiography (and only nonfiction work), Daddy's Girl, is in its twenty-ninth paperback printing. Sudden Moves is her thirty-eighth novel.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

After years of self-imposed, fearful reclusiveness inside her home, Lucinda Hunter has started moving out into the world. She has found her family and her isolation has ended, largely thanks to Katanya Taylor, who ventured into her garden five years earlier and beckoned to Lucinda to come outside. Now a feisty, somewhat irreverent teenager, Katanya comes with her mother and grandmother to spend weekends with Lucinda — their initial connection stronger than ever.

Everything is going well. Yet Lucinda feels an urgent anxiety, fearful that she will never have sufficient time to spend with her own very elderly grandmother, that she will never be able to absorb all the details of her family history. She is racing against time. Yet she is happier than she's been since childhood. And meeting Eli Carter, her grandmother's doctor, presents an unexpected and challenging set of new circumstances.

Then, on September 11, 2001, the world is cataclysmically changed. In the aftermath, faced with the shattering repercussions that affect everyone and everything Lucinda knows, she is pulled, finally, entirely, into a new reality.

With insightful sensitivity Charlotte Vale Allen explores the hearts and minds of Lucinda, her friends and family as they grapple with the terrible upheaval in their lives as a result of a single day's events.

New York Times bestselling author Charlotte Vale Allen worked (among other things) as a salesperson, a waitress, a secretary, an insurance broker and as an actress and singer before turning to writing full-time with the publication of her first novel, Love Life, in 1976.

Born in Toronto, Canada, Allen moved to the U.S. in 1966 and has lived in Connecticut since 1970. Her award-winning autobiography (and only nonfiction work), Daddy's Girl, is in its twenty-ninth paperback printing. Sudden Moves is her thirty-eighth novel.