The Passions of Chelsea Kane

After the death of her adoptive mother, thirty-six-year-old Chelsea Kane is consumed by the need to uncover her biological heritage. Taking a break from her successful architecture career, she arrives in the New Hampshire town where she was born, determined to learn the truth, her only clue a tarnished silver key.

One of her first discoveries, however, is something quite unexpected: the irresistibly attractive Judd Street. Buoyed by love and resolution, the determined Chelsea slowly begins to uncover the dark mystery of her past. But as she inches closer to the truth, she realizes that someone is trying to stop her, first by scaring her, then by trying to harm her. The danger escalates until one terrifying night when all secrets are laid bare.

With memorable characters and writing that will stir the hearts and minds of all readers, The Passions of Chelsea Kane is the kind of compelling narrative that has earned Barbara Delinsky an ever-widening readership.

She becomes pregnant but before she can tell Carl, he informs her he is marrying the woman who is carrying his twins. Needing a place to escape to and wanting to find out about her biological roots, Chelsea moves to the small conservative village of her birth, buys into a business and meets Judd Streeter who is Chelsea's foreman on the quarry site. While the two fight their growing feelings for one another, someone in town attempts to scare her into leaving, going so far as to trying to run her over and burning down her home.

It has been over eleven years since THE PASSIONS OF CHELSEA KANE was published but classics such as this stand the test of time and remain a strong read when reprinted. The relationship between the heroine and her love is so dynamic and explosive, sparks fly off the pages. The townsfolk are an interesting group who give color and atmosphere to the plot and demonstrate that even in a small hamlet, there remains a huge gap between the classes.

Harriet Klausner


Good story about an adoptee   December 18, 2003
 1 out of 2 found this review helpful

What a wonderful story of an adoptee and her struggle to find her birth heritage. When her adoptive mother dies, Chelsea Kane begins to commute between her position as a partner in a lucrative Baltimore architectural firm and her new position as a partner in a granite company in the small New Hampshire town of Norwich Notch where she was born. Her adoptive father strains against her doing this. He cannot understand her need to find her heritage.

Trying to please her father, she has a one-night stand with her long time friend and business partner which her father also wants her to marry. Unfortunately, they are better friends than lovers but Chelsea becomes pregnant. The day she plans to tell him is the day she finds out he is going to marry a former girlfriend.

Without telling him she is pregnant, she throws herself into the granite business and renovates a farmhouse in her birth town. But all is not well. There are those who don't want an outsider in their town. But Chelsea is determined to find her heritage. In the process, she finds a half of her she never knew existed and a man who is willing to stand beside her through it all.


Too much s-e-x distracts from the story!   July 11, 2003
 4 out of 16 found this review helpful

Of course, author Barbara Delinsky, started her writing career with Harlequin; so, obviously there are going to be sex scenes in her novels. This was one of the older novels, which came out in 1992 as a paperback, perhaps before she began writing mainstream hard-cover fiction. For this reason, I can make some allowances, owing to the genre of that time, and the title of course, "Passions of Chelsea Kane" is certainly not going to be about a nun in a convent.

However, it gets irritating after awhile. Central character Chelsea Kane casually sleeps with her childhood friend, just to see if they are compatible. They are not. Oh well. Chelsea then moves to a small town in New England where the whole rest of the novel seems to be pre-occupied with Chelsea's lusty thoughts for one of the granite workers at the town quarry she has just bought. Scene after scene of gratuitous sex, even during Chelsea's pregnancy, yuck. And, even hints at sex during her breast-feeding, double yuck. Chelsea had arrived in the small New England town pregnant, and doesn't even bother having her new lover take an AIDs test, which could have injured her unborn child, I would think. There was AIDs in 1992, so I feel author, Barbara Delinsky was very irresponsible making pregnant Chelsea Kane so promiscuous, whether it serves the plot or not.

Why did Chelsea purchase a granite factory in a small-town of New England? Chelsea was adopted as a child and she is now looking for her birth-parents who came out of that town. She is an architect and granite gives her a reason to get involved with the small town to see if she can find her parents amongst the townspeople.

All the quarrying for granite stuff is about as interesting as the maple-sugaring stuff in Delinsky's "Accidental Woman" novel. The problem with writing so technical about these crafts is that if the reader is simply not interested in maple syrup, gardening, grape-growing, or quarrying........the whole novel will be a big bore.

Delinsky is not so great at suspense and mystery either. The reader can easily guess who Chelsea's surprise parents will be. The ending of this long-drawn out novel is pretty lackluster as too many clues were handed out long before and there really aren't much surprises.

What is good here is the narrow-mindedness of the small-town attitudes. Delinsky is an expert at capturing the feel of small New England towns and the petty and small attitudes of the townspeople towards urbane Chelsea Kane. There are some great scenes of the long-time denizens of small-town Norwitch Notch arguing with city-dweller, Chelsea, as the townspeople simply do not want her there and try to run her out of town. In fact, I would go so far as to say that author Barbara Delinsky's small town "Norwich Notch" in this novel, which she custom-created, is about as expertly defined as "Empire Falls" was in Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Richard Russo's "Empire Falls" novel----which won the Pulitzer in 2001.

Both Richard Russo "Empire Falls" and Barbara Delinsky are perhaps the best in all of fiction at creating accurate New England small towns.

However, I'm still going to take one star off for the bizarre sex scenes. And, one star off for all the boring stuff about granite and quarrying.