Synopsis
Mattie Ryder is a marvelously funny, well-intentioned, religious, sarcastic, tender, angry, and broke recently divorced mother of two young children. Then she finds a small rubber blue shoe - the kind you might get from a gumball machine - and a few other trifles that were left years ago in her father's car. They seem to hold the secrets to her messy upbringing, and as she and her brother follow these clues to uncover the mystery of their past, she begins to open her heart to her difficult, brittle mother and the father she thought she knew. And with that acceptance comes an opening up to the possibilities of romantic love.
In a disarming blend of everyday life and the sublime, of reverence and irreverence, and of humor and grace, Anne Lamott speaks directly to our most closely held concerns, bringing comfort to anyone - all of us - whose family life can feel overwhelming and uncontainable.
Book Magazine
Lamott's sixth novel shows her protagonist, Mattie Ryder, dealing with the sorts of temptations to which devout Christians rarely admit. Can middle-aged Mattie, a beleaguered mother and daughter, remain an essentially moral person while continuing to sleep with (and wanting to kill) her philandering ex-husband? Should she covet the affections of her handyman friend, who is faithfully, if not happily, married? It's a test of faith for Lamott's characters to find evidence of God's grace amid lives of such messy complexity, but the author shows that it's possible to find Jesus (as she herself has) without losing a sense of humor. Lamott's tragicomic embrace of life's travails and blessings reads like born-again Anne Tyler with a hippie past, depicting a generation that has exchanged the radical rebellions of the '60s for the comforts of lattes and white wine, National Public Radio and diminished expectations. There are a lot of flaws to be found in this book soap opera complications, politically correct clichés but there's also a lot of life. Author Don McLeese