Midsummer — Marcelle Clements

A splendid Hudson River estate, complete with cook and rose garden. The landscape is inebriating, the women are in full, passionate bloom, and the men are incomprehensible. Susie-chic, smart, spacey, and no longer promiscuous- decides, at forty-five, to do what she would have done at twenty-five: invite a group of amusing friends to spend eight weekends of summer in stunning surroundings. The invitees include her oldest friend, Kay, elegantly nursing a broken heart; her former lover Dodge-still the sexiest man she knows; his randy, neurotic, comedian friend Ron; and Elise, an on-the-cusp artist determined to be in a relationship before she hits forty. Add to the mix Susie's very ardent, very surprising twenty-four-year-old son, and an exhibitionist au pair next door, and you have a delicious romantic farce that deftly slides into and out of something quite a bit darker.