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In the summer of 1974, Kate Mularkey has accepted her place at the bottom of the eighth-grade social food chain. Then, to her amazement, the “coolest girl in the world” moves in across the street and wants to be her friend. Tully Hart seems to have it all—beauty, brains, ambition. On the surface they are as opposite as two people can be: Kate, doomed to be forever uncool, with a loving family who mortifies her at every turn; Tully, steeped in glamour and mystery, but with a secret that is destroying her. They make a pact to be best friends forever; by summer’s end they’ve become TullyandKate. Inseparable.
So begins Kristin Hannah’s magnificent novel. Spanning more than three decades and playing out across the ever-changing face of the Pacific Northwest, Firefly Lane is the poignant, powerful story of two women and the friendship that becomes the mainstay of their lives.
From the beginning, Tully is desperate to prove her worth to the world. Abandoned by her mother at an early age, she longs to be loved unconditionally. She will follow her own blind ambition to New York and around the globe, finding fame and success…and loneliness.
All Kate really wants is to fall in love and have children and live an ordinary life. In her own quiet way, Kate is as driven as Tully. What she doesn’t know is how being a wife and mother will change her…how she’ll lose sight of who she once was, and what she once wanted. And how much she’ll envy her famous best friend.…
For thirty years, Tully and Kate buoy each other through life, weathering the storms of friendship—jealousy, anger, hurt, resentment. They think they’ve survived it all until a single act of betrayal tears them apart…and puts their courage and friendship to the ultimate test.
Firefly Lane is for anyone who ever drank Boone’s Farm apple wine while listening to Abba or Fleetwood Mac. More than a coming-of-age novel, it’s the story of a generation of women who were both blessed and cursed by choices. It’s about promises and secrets and betrayals. And ultimately, about the one person who really, truly knows you—and knows what has the power to hurt you…and heal you. Firefly Lane is a story you’ll never forget…one you’ll want to pass on to your best friend.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Product details
Paperback
Publisher: Pan (July 18, 2013)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1447229533
ISBN-13: 978-1447229537
Product Dimensions: 5 x 1.1 x 7.8 inches
Shipping Weight: 12.6 ounces
Average Customer Review: 4.5 star See all reviews (2,557 customer reviews)
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,976,875 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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More about the author
Kristin Hannah is an award-winning and bestselling author of more than 20 novels including Winter Garden, Night Road, and the blockbuster Firefly Lane which sold over 1.2 million copies.
Her novels Home Front and Night Road were among the first novels to appear in the #1 spot on 5 New York Times bestseller lists simultaneously. Home Front has been optioned for film by 1492 Films (produced the Oscar-nominated The Help) with Chris Columbus attached to write, produce, and direct.
Kristin's highly anticipated new release, The Nightingale, will be published on February 3, 2015 (St. Martin's Press). The novel --an epic love story and family drama set in France at the dawn of World War II--is a profound and compelling portrait of two estranged sisters, living in a city under siege and a country at war, where sometimes surviving means doing the unthinkable.
www.kristinhannah.comEditorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
A Conversation with Kristin Hannah
Amazon.com: Why did you choose Seattle as the backdrop for Firefly Lane? Is there something unique about growing up in the Northwest that helped you to define the kind of women Kate and Tully become?
Kristin Hannah: Quite simply, I chose Seattle as the backdrop for Firefly Lane because it's so much a part of who I am. I've lived in the Northwest for most of my life, and obviously, in all those years, I've seen this part of the country evolve from an undiscovered gem into the Emerald City. So many of the places from my youth are gone, or changed, or moved, and I guess I wanted to remember the physical reminders of those bygone days. And while Kate and Tully are absolutely Northwest girls, I like to think their story will speak to women who grew up in vastly different, more populated areas. After all, it's ultimately about friendship, and those seeds can be planted anywhere.
Amazon.com: While you were writing, at any point did you find yourself feeling more sympathetic to Kate or to Tully? How did you keep the weight of the plot balanced between them as their stories evolved?
KH: There's no way to avoid the truth that Kate is more than a little like me. Thus, I identified with her from the very beginning--she was the small town girl who had to get up in the pre-dawn hours to feed her horses, and read The Lord of the Rings during every family vacation, and felt lost in the first few months at the sprawling University of Washington. All of that was me, so naturally, the problem was not in feeling sympathetic toward Katie; it was much more about holding her at arm's length, seeing her not as an extension of myself, but as a completely fictional woman. Tully was a different story entirely. While many readers might be surprised by this, I really fell in love with Tully. In the final analysis, she's one of my favorite characters of all time. I know she's bold and selfish and myopic and ambitious to a fault, but she's also terribly broken, wounded by her parents, unable to believe in love, and ultimately very real. I think all of us know a "Tully" in our lives, and they bring a lot of drama...and a lot of fire and sparkle.
Amazon.com: You have a beautiful way of showing both the tension and tenderness between mothers and daughters. Was it a challenge to write Tully's painful history with her own mother, and later, the conflict that builds between Kate and her own daughter?
KH: Honestly, I believe that the mother-daughter relationship is magical, complex, potentially dangerous, profoundly powerful, and deeply transformative. To put it simply, all of us have this relationship, and in a very real way, "none of us comes out alive." We are all formed first as daughters and then tested as mothers. There's nothing like motherhood to make us reassess how we were as daughters. One of my favorite parts of Firefly Lane was the circle of Kate’s relationship with her mom. First we see her as an angry teen, slamming the door on her mother...and then later her own daughter does the same thing to her. There's a real symmetry in that, a truth that many of us have learned. I have often wished in the past few years that my mom were here to help me as I raised my own teenage son. As a girl, with my own mom, I thought I knew it all; now I know better. Somewhere, I know my mom is smiling.
Amazon.com: Throughout the novel, both Kate and Tully question the reliability of love. Is it that question that creates the rift between them and, ultimately, reunites them in friendship?
KH: You're right, they each do continually question the reliability of love. For Kate, it's a self-esteem issue. She absolutely believes in love--she's grown up surrounded by it--but she constantly questions Johnny's commitment to her. I always felt that was largely because she felt like a moon to Tully's bright and shining sun. For Tully, she honestly doesn’t believe that true romantic love exists, and for all of her overblown ambition and belief in herself, she has been wounded by her mother's repeated abandonment. The result is that she feels she's unlovable.
Amazon.com: Kate and Tully are each big personalities in their own way. Was it hard to create male characters who really understand them?
KH:The challenge with regard to male characters was not so much creating men who understood Kate and Tully, it was rather to create love stories that equaled the power and emotional intensity of the friendship. After all, the men in the story were important--Johnny particularly--but it was really a story about the women.
Amazon.com: When Wally Lamb's She's Come Undone first came out, many readers were shocked that a man could write such an intimate portrait of a woman. Do you think women are in fact the best writers of women's fiction? Would you ever consider writing a novel where men take center stage?
KH: One of the great things about being a writer is that we get the chance to inhabit the minds and souls of a variety of individuals. I really don't think male/female is the central question in terms of the viability of a voice and/or vision. We writers can "become" murderers, animals, psychopaths, vampires, lawyers, doctors, wizards, children. In short, our storytelling skills and character-building abilities are limited only by our own imaginations. Until recently, most of my novels--while female-centric in vision--were equally narrated by male characters, and one--Angel Falls—was primarily narrated by men. I didn't see the writing of that any different than anything else.
Amazon.com: Do you see yourself as a writer of romance or women's fiction? What do you see as the differences in these two genres--is one an evolution of the other, or is the label unimportant?
KH: I began as a romance author and moved into women's fiction about ten years ago. While many definitions abound, mine is this: romance is a subsection of the broad, all-inclusive women's commercial fiction market. Women's fiction in general is not an evolution of romance; much of women's fiction is completely unrelated to any romantic elements. However, it is true that many current commercial women's fiction authors began in romance.
Amazon.com:Many women read fictional romance to escape the stress of everyday life and find inspiration in a happy ending. Is there a primary experience that you hope your readers will have after reading Firefly Lane?
KH: I am a sucker for a happy ending myself. In fact, my husband and I often go round and round about movies in which I hate the ending and he loves it. He always says I'm only comfortable with happy ever after, but that's not true. What I want is an emotionally satisfying, organic ending. I want to be totally engaged until the last page, and I want to believe every moment up until I close the book. Sometimes I want to laugh, sometimes I want to cry, and sometimes I want to scream that it can’t really be over. (Harry Potter comes to mind on this one). The point is, I want to be moved deeply. That's what I look for in other books and what I hope to deliver in my own.
Just FYI, here are some of my favorite endings: Gone With the Wind, Middlemarch, Prince of Tides, An Inconvenient Wife, The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, To Kill a Mockingbird, It, Shadow of the Wind. Some are happy, some are sad, some are bittersweet. All are memorable.
Amazon.com: If you could meet any writer, living or dead, who would it be, and what would you ask them?
KH: There are, of course, dozens of choices here, and I could certainly go through the classics and come up with many names and questions, but the truth is that I would love to sit down with Stephen King and listen to some rock and roll, and ask him how in the world he has stayed so good for so long.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.From Publishers Weekly
Hannah (On Mystic Lake) goes a little too far into Lifetime movie territory in her latest, an epic exploration of the complicated terrain between best friends—one who chooses marriage and motherhood while the other opts for career and celebrity. The adventures of poor, ambitious Tully Hart and middle-class romantic Kate Mularkey begin in the 1970s, but don't really get moving until about halfway into the book, when Tully, who claws her way to the heights of broadcast journalism, discovers it's lonely at the top, and Katie, a stay-at-home Seattle housewife, forgets what it's like to be a rebellious teen. What holds the overlong narrative together is the appealing nature of Tully and Katie's devotion to one another even as they are repeatedly tested by jealousy and ambition. Katie's husband, Johnny, is smitten with Tully, and Tully, who is abandoned by her own booze-and-drug-addled mother, relishes the adoration from Katie's daughter, Marah. Hannah takes the easy way out with an over-the-top tear-jerker ending, though her upbeat message of the power of friendship and family will, for some readers, trump even the most contrived plot twists.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.Customer Reviews
2.0 star
All buzzwords of decades, actual story too adolescent and boring.
ByMad Hatteron June 10, 2015|Verified Purchase
Lots of the right buzzwords and references of being a teen in the mid 1970's and brought back memories of the 80s, 90s, and today just like hearing a favorite song on the radio but this book failed to hold my interest due to lengthy adolescent mondane musha. And it continued into the decades. I read, 'Nightingale' in 1-day loved it and was looking forward to a blast from the past which I can itentify with the years as well as having one special best friend from childhood and continues today. The word, disappointing should be underscored and highlighted. I agree with the Reviewer who thinks it's 'Beaches'. This book had a potential to be great but in my humble opinion, missed it.
2.0 star
Enough already.......
Byjessicaon December 18, 2016|Verified Purchase
So I'm fairly new to Kristen Hannah whom I really enjoy but this book turns me off. I've read a lot of the reviews so I know how it ends even though I haven't finished it yet. I'm writing this review mid-stream because the characters are ridiculous. Even though there are people like them in this world (I'm a therapist so I've seen my fair share), writing about them makes me want to refer them to some 12 step program (AA, Codependents Anonymous, or therapy.). It's difficult to read about two women whose needs are so profoundly deep that nothing gets through to them except the draw of their addictions. Reality has no place in this book while the characteristics of their disease takes them over time and time again. I want to say that I understand these women since I've been one of them but why write pages and pages and pages that focuses their inability to change anything about themselves?? And even if one or both of them finds someone to love, it's either years worth of agony to get there OR, like Tully, love means being with someone who must put her first - all the time. I will finish this book but it's a hard one to stay with.
3.0 star
Very Beaches
ByLori Petersonon April 3, 2013|Verified Purchase
Warning: SPOILERS
I really have mixed emotions about this book. I had a best friend growing up that I lost in a car accident at the age of 28. I SO wanted to relate to the characters, but I just didn't. I understand the friendship and how the completely different personalities could work as best friends at a young age. After growing up, however, I think reality would have set in and they would have drifted apart because their lives were so vastly different.
Some of the other elements of the book had me scratching my head a bit:
-It seemed, at times, that the writer went to some kind of online timeline and found relevant events and songs and dispersed them throughout the book.
-Johnny has a devastating, near-fatal injury and has NO long-term effects?
-We never find out what Tully's grandmother did to Cloud to cause her actions.
-Tully never gets her mother into treatment?
-The completely dysfunctional mother (Kate)/daughter (Marah) relationship scared me. I can only hope my daughter isn't that difficult...the book makes it seem like it's the norm even though I'm one of three girls and never saw the dysfunction to that extent.
I understand that the illness was meant to bring awareness to this devastating type of cancer, but I kept visualizing the movie "Beaches." They even had Adirondack chairs down by the water.
The book kept me engaged, but I sorta felt like I wished I had never read it after I was done.
2.0 star
Big Kristin Hannah fan says "Meh"
ByAmazon Customeron September 18, 2012|Verified Purchase
The problem with telling a story that spans 30+ years is that you learn about everything and nothing at all. The novel skims four decades, but doesn't explore anything in detail. I have no idea why Kate and Tully were friends. Everything Tully does on the pages of this book makes her seem just awful. She is the type of person you may be friends with in high school when your world is small and your options limited. But, as soon as you get into the bigger world and meet new people and come into yourself, you drop a Tully like a bad habit and surround yourself with good people who have your back.
Now, perhaps something happened 'behind the scenes' that could explain their 'forever friends' pact, but the reader doesn't know, as these details are neglected in lieu of a list of pop culture references showing the passage of time.
I was particularly unnerved by Tully's unhealthy involvement in parenting Kate's oldest daughter. Tully should't be allowed within 10 miles of a child. Some readers seemed to be bothered by *spoiler alert* a perceived inappropriate relationship between Tully and Johnny. I actually believe that although Tully may have held a torch for Johnny in later years - or maybe just for what Johnny represented - Johnny was completely in love with and devoted to Kate. The suggestion that he had feelings for Tully were just Kate's insecurities being expressed.
5.0 star
Kristin Hannah understands lived our generation
ByTJMon August 6, 2016|Verified Purchase
Firefly Lane was a trip down Memory Lane. From Little Kiddles (I still have mine) to David Cassidy (his pictures were all over my closet doors), to Boone Farms wine (I didn't try any wine for years after my first drink of Boone Farms), pouring over Tiger Beat and Sixteen and many other items mentioned. I really understood though the daughter/mother, mother/daughter and friends relationships. Women's relationships are not easy, but oh are they worth the effort. Kristin Hannah nails the relationships. I recommend this book to every mother, daughter (if she is over the age of 25
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