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How long does it take to read Cassandra at the Wedding?

Dorothy Baker

Cassandra at the Wedding by Dorothy Baker takes about 4 hours 9 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.

About 4 hours 9 minutes

A weekend read

First published 1962. 226 pages, about 62,150 words.

9 days at 30 minutes a day

Estimate based on 275 words per page.

At other speeds

Slow, 150 words a minute 6 hours 54 minutes
Average, 250 words a minute 4 hours 9 minutes
Fast, 400 words a minute 2 hours 35 minutes

The page count is the median across 19 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.

About the book

Cassandra Edwards is a graduate student at Berkeley: gay, brilliant, nerve-wracked, miserable. At the beginning of this novel, she drives back to her family ranch in the foothills of the Sierras to attend the wedding of her identical twin, Judith, to a nice young doctor from Connecticut. Cassandra, however, is hell-bent on sabotaging the wedding. Dorothy Baker's entrancing tragicomic novella follows an unpredictable course of events in which her heroine appears variously as conniving, self-aware, pitiful, frenzied, absurd, and heartbroken—at once utterly impossible and tremendously sympathetic. Cassandra reckons with her complicated feelings about the sister who she feels owes it to her to be her alter ego; with her father, a brandy-soaked retired professor of philosophy; and with the ghost of her dead mother, as she struggles to come to terms with the only life she has. First published in 1962, Cassandra at the Wedding is a book of enduring freshness, insight, and verve. Like the fiction of Jeffrey Eugenides and Jhumpa Lahiri, it is the work of a master stylist with a profound understanding of the complexities of the heart and mind.

Subjects: Death, Family, Mothers, Weddings, Fiction, Twins

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