Lynne Kathryn Cote is a Connecticut-based author and former health care provider, recognized for her expertise in end-of-life care. Her debut work of fiction was the short story collection The Long Road, and she recently published her first novel, Strawberry Pie. She happily resides with her husband, John, and is currently working on her second novel.
Cecelia Knowles is on a journey of redemption. Her privileged life has been sullied by her alcohol abuse and chronic depression. Lannie Forrest, a black single mother of three, questions her life choices as she struggles toward graduating from community college. Their meeting is happenstance, and, impressed by Lannie's efforts to achieve a better life, Cecelia is soon involved in the perpetual problems of the Forrest family; and Lannie becomes increasingly dependent on their friendship. When Cecelia's attachment to Lannie's youngest, three-year-old Jamie, becomes suspect, tensions within both families build. The story takes a dark turn with the return of Jamie's father to the Forrest home, spiraling Strawberry Pie toward tomorrow's headline.
Kirkus Reviews- " Cote is an adept juggler of characters and scenes; her dense novel has a large supporting cast of kids, lovers, and in-laws, but Cote weaves Cecelia and Lannie through them in a way that keeps everyone and everything coherent. Her ear for dialogue is sharp, and . . . the novel affords these women the space to air their all-too-real troubles, as only inspired fiction can."
The Long Road sets thirteen stories in a world too often less than kind. A world which includes Butte, Montana and New Yorks Hudson River Valley, a Manhattan apartment and a Florida airport, a small college town in Pennsylvania and a hospice in New England. The characters are affluent and poor, young and older, black and white, married and widowed, immigrant and long bred American. For some, their regrets and the burden of their haunting histories are too great; but more often Cote allows for hope, for the everyday of carrying-on.