Fans of Gage (Confession) are apt to be divided on her tale of three friends whose pubescent pact of lifelong "threeness" defines their lives. In this novel, her prose is uncharacteristically heavy, and the narrative meanders. The action derives from a promise made on a moonlit golf course in a small Maine town when the three are 13 years old and vow that, 15 years hence, they will meet in the same spot. The promise is kept by coincidence, only one of the romantic plot devices here that stretch believability. Not that there's much for the reader to believe in the male member of the threesome: Jordan Brady is a rich guy out of central casting, without sufficient distinguishing marks. But Gage, typically, has created two interesting female protagonists who don't quite inhabit their own skins: the gallant but troubled Lily France and the orphaned narrator, Kate, whose last name is never given. Gage's pacing is artful, however, as she uses flashbacks to reveal first one and then another of the many hidden truths about those two freighted nights. Alas, there's so much darkness in the twisted tunnel, so much loss, sorrow, misdirected love and tragic death, that only readers who prefer a good cry before the bittersweet ending will make it through.

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You might call this a romance in 3 dimensions---You might not. Gage sucks you in and has you vitally interested in the whys and wherefores of the three intertwined lives, and then hits you between the eyes with an unexpectedly shocking unraveling.

From back cover: They are three children, brought together by loneliness and encroaching tragedy, who forge a friendship that will define their lives. To orphaned Kate, who idolizes Lily and feels a strange kinship to Jordan, this "threeness becomes the touchstone of her identity.
As adolescents on the eve of separation they make a promise to meet at their favorite place, an abandoned golf course, in fifteen years. Life sweeps them far from each other and along different paths, and the promise is forgotten.
Then Kate, now a successful writer in New York, suddenly remembers the promise. She returns to the town of her youth and makes her way through the darkness to the appointed spot.
What she finds will open the door to a destiny she had never dreamed of for herself. And not until love and obsession have made the sands of time flow in unpredictable directions will the stories of all three friends come to a suprising end.

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Well written, interesting plot.

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The Hourglass by Elizabeth Gage is a haunting novel of love, friendship, and a fateful promise. As children the three friends made a promise to meet in fifteen years on an abandoned golf course. Kate goes to the meeting place and what she finds there will change the rest of her life. This promise should not have been kept but it was and the story was interesting look at the twist and turns that life brought to Kate, Lily, and Jordan. The love that they shared as children lasted them a lifetime through all of the up and downs of their lives.The simple things that they did for each other like when they first meet Jordan at a funeral they all went for a long walk together and that day was the day there "threeness" started. For a few years their whole lives where each other.They would spend hours out on the golf course just sitting and talking. When Jordan left for school the three of them stayed close together even though they are far apart.This book was very interesting because the story took turns and twists, and it would keep you on your toes by going back in forth between the future and the past.

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