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