Overview
Six months after breaking up with Tom, her husband of eighteen years, Polly Harrison is still trying to put her life in order. Her two smart-alecky kids are driving her to distraction, and she has to work as an office temp just to make ends meet. In her spare moments, she scribbles away at country music lyrics and dreams of a career in Nashville. And all the while, she still obsesses over what Tom is doing, even to the point of carrying on elaborate fantasy conversations with the "other woman." But just when Polly thinks she's finally ready for social life as a newly single woman, her eighty-two-year-old grandmother drops in for a visit - and then decides to stay, disrupting the whole household. Something even more surprising is waiting right outside Polly's front door, although it's not quite what she thought she was hoping for.... Banished from the home they fashioned together, Tom is actually more present than he ever was before. Guilt and renewed faith have brought him back to the house he spent so much time away from. But Polly, driven by her own longing and confusion, turns away from home - to her first brave but hesitant steps toward a freedom that might only be an illusion, then to the arms of a familiar stranger, finally and inevitably to the rich heritage she has almost forgotten, the country music of her early years. With her grandmother as a constant reminder of her Oklahoma childhood, Polly's lyrics begin flowing from her troubled heart - sometimes revealing more about living and loving than she knows, but always taking her back to a past she barely remembers and forward to a present she is only now beginning to understand. Filled with the small truths that hit close to home, Sweet Remedy is a rueful and funny account of the painful lessons of domestic life and love, where the bitter mixes with the sweet in surprising proportions. As her ornery grandmother stubbornly forces a mysterious inheritance on her, Polly slowly comes to realize that the heaEditorials
Publishers Weekly -
There's a glut of perkiness in the way 40-year-old Polly Harrison tells of a major wobble in her life and how she got things spinning truly in the end. Life went seriously awry the moment she caught her husband, Tom, getting cozy with another woman in the garden of an oddball beach hotel not far from their L.A. home. She promptly kicked him out, and now, six months later, she's all alone raising Kate and Toby, her surly adolescents, and writing mournful, painfully bad country songs in her spare time. Then, all the way from Granite, Okla., comes Polly's octogenarian grandmother, a feisty old bird in overalls who's a dead ringer for Granny on The Beverly Hillbillies. Can Granny Settle's folksy down-home wisdom pull Polly out of her funk? It's hard to tell, amid the teeming masses of peripheral characters and tangled subplots Ashour pours into her sprawling third novel (after Joy Baby). There's Polly's next-door neighbor, Russell, a wealthy contractor who's got the hots for her; crazy cousin Rory, an old Harley-riding hippie; and Barney, the creepy stalker. And aging country-music legend Johnny Day just might be persuaded to sing one of Polly's songs on tour. With so many balls in the air, Ashour is hard-pressed to keep her chatty narrative moving in the same direction for more than a few pages, but readers who hang in there will eventually learn what becomes of plucky Polly. But by then, they may have forgotten why they ever wanted to know. (May)Library Journal
With her third novel (following Joy Baby, LJ 6/1/92), Ashour has a winner. Readers will genuinely care about the cast of realistic characters she has created, especially the many generations of Settle family women: 40-year-old Polly Harrison; Granny, Polly's mother; and Kate, Polly's teenage daughter. Polly is recently separated from husband Tom and, when she isn't working temp jobs, writes country-and-western song lyrics. The novel is set in Los Angeles but evokes a sense of nature and of the Settle family's roots in Granite, Oklahoma. Ashour's style is funny and moving, and the lyrics she includes are perfect; one can almost hear the songs as they are read. She has a perfect pitch for dialog and descriptions and works wonders with the themes of love, family, forgiveness, and continuity. Tom and Polly's hard-won reconciliation is on the mark, Granny Settle is an original, and the whole novel is writing at its best. Recommended for popular collections.-Rebecca Sturm Kelm, Northern Kentucky Univ. Lib., Highland HeightsChicago Tribune
...spontaneous, honest and quirkily funny. You'll be so crazy about Polly Harrison that you'll start missing her the minute you turn the last page.Kirkus Reviews
Offering a conventional analysis of the woes of a modern marriage, Ashour (Joy Baby, 1992, etc.) relies on homespun quirkiness to distract readers from routine plotting.Polly Harrison finds herself "a tourist in a terrible country," that is, single again at 40. Newly separated from husband Tom, Polly confronts her anger at his adulterous betrayal, the venom of two adolescent kids who want dad back in the house, and the unexpected arrival of Granny Settle. At 82, Granny Settle has driven her pick-up truck from her home in Granite, Oklahoma (Polly and Tom's hometown too), to Polly's Los Angeles house in order to distribute the last of her belongings and get herself ready for dying. A rodeo cowgirl in her youth, Granny Settle has brought along plenty of stories, fistfuls of red Granite dirt, and a "feisty" personality. But Polly and the kids have weightier concerns. Polly, it seems, has a newly discovered interest in writing country-and-western lyrics, as well as a vacillating new romance with Russell, the next-door neighbor. Events plod forward as Polly does temp work and writes songs, until her big break rolls into town in the guise of an old-time country singer who may be interested in her lyrics (which are scattered throughout the novel). Thrown into the stew is a stalker who quickly moves from crazy to deadly in a plot that element seems as out of place as Granny Settle on the streets of LA. Still, with Granny's tales of folksy honor infusing the house, there's never a doubt that things will work out for Polly and her family, who unite for an unabashedly sentimental finale, driving home the necessity of roots in this modern world.
Though adept enough in the actual storytelling, Ashour rehashes themes (divorce, midlife love, return to home and hearth) that are all too familiar.