The Do-Over by Kathy Dunnehoff

I don’t know for sure, but I imagine the idea for The Do- Over came about like this: I’m guessing the author is an overworked woman balancing job, marriage, and motherhood (or perhaps she has experienced that trifecta in the past) when one day she stops and dreams about giving herself a day off from it all. Then, since she’s a writer, the woman takes the idea further and asks herself: What if someone really did that? And what if the escape started out as a day, stretched to a week, and ended up being a month? And what if my heroine not only escaped her town but went to another country? What would happen then? With humor and insight, Kathy Dunnehoff gives us the answers to those questions in The Do- Over.

Here’s the synopsis from Dunnehoff’s website:

When a solid wife and mother runs out of bubble bath, the ensuing panic attack drives her to Canada for more.  She realizes one foamy bath probably won’t cure what ails her, so she commits to staying away from her life for thirty days.  She changes her name, her habits, her style, her outlook, hoping she’ll be restored and ready to return home and buy ketchup in bulk again.

Her son’s visiting Grandma, and she’s sure her husband will understand.  He understands she’s run away from home, tracks her down, and discovers she’s pursuing work at the bubble bath company and the owner’s pursuing her.  Like any pro-active husband, he pitches a fit, cancels her credit cards, and flies his mom in to bring her home.

But home doesn’t look the same from a distance, and her new friends, the strip-club-loving Red Hat Society grandmas and a pack of lesbian jazz singers, help her discover home right where she’s planted.  But thirty days goes quickly and even Dorothy had to make a decision about whether or not to click her heels back to Kansas…

The things I enjoyed most about The Do-Over were Dunnehoff’s understatement and sense of humor. For example, she describes a character’s night filled with strange dreams this way:

“All she knew was that her night had been filled with men. Not any she knew personally, but ones she’d come to know pretty damn personally by morning. There were men who touched her and whispered in her ear the kind of things she couldn’t believe her unconscious mind was capable of inventing. There were things she didn’t know men could do. Maybe they were things real men couldn’t do, but the secret men in her dark dreams were all kinds of capable, flexible, muscular, and excitedly creative….There’d been handcuffs, public parks, and if she remembered correctly, produce involved. She may never be able to look at a salad bar again without a measure of desire.”

I laughed out loud at that! I love that she didn’t give the specifics of her dreams but left me to imagine the “things” on my own, especially regarding the salad bar. That passage also told me a lot about the protagonist—that she was not the sort of woman who’d even think X-rated thoughts.

If you enjoy books with plenty of humor, and you can relate to how a harried woman might overreact if she ran out of her favorite bubble bath, then you’ll definitely enjoy The Do-Over.

Book Review: The Longings of Women

Several weeks ago, I cleared off part of a bookshelf, and then took a shopping bag full of paperbacks to my local used book store. My idea was to get organized, with the bonus of receiving a little cash for books I probably wouldn’t reread. Unfortunately, the bookstore owner said they don’t give cash any more but give credit instead – which meant I’d be bringing home more books! But the good news is that one of the books I found was The Longings of Women by Marge Piercy.

This book tells the stories of three women whose lives intersect. The main character, Leila Landsman, is a college professor and an expert on abused women who has written several books on the subject. When her publisher urges her to write about Becky Burgess, a young woman who will soon go on trial for murdering her husband, she accepts the assignment.

For years Leila’s theater-director husband has had serial love affairs with ingénues in his cast, with the understanding that once the play has closed, he’ll return home. But when Leila’s husband’s latest mistress becomes pregnant and then her best friend dies, Leila takes a close look at her life and doesn’t like what she sees.

Accused murderer Becky Burgess’s story is seamlessly told both in flashbacks and in present time. Raised in poverty, she has devoted her life to becoming successful and schemes to marry a man she believes will be her ticket to affluence. However, things don’t go as smoothly as she planned, and her marriage falls apart when her husband loses his job.

A third woman’s story is woven into the plot – that of Mary Burke, a woman in her early sixties who works for a janitorial service and who cleans Leila’s house. Though she lived an upper-middle-class life before her divorce, Mary is now secretly homeless, sleeping in church basements, abandoned buildings, and her clients’ homes whenever they are out of town. Mary’s daily struggle to eat, sleep, keep clean, stay healthy, and remain safe, as well as her shame over her homelessness, was portrayed by Piercy in very real scenes. When a series of events destroys Mary’s carefully maintained marginal existence, her secret homelessness is revealed.

Although the three women are strikingly different, they all want the same things: respect, love, and the security of a home. Piercy demonstrates their similarities through details about each woman’s world.

Although The Longings of Women was copyrighted in 1994, the story felt fresh and could have taken place today. I definitely recommend this book. It’s one I will read again.

FYI: Marge Piercy is a poet (Circles on the Water is in its fifteenth printing), a memoirist (Sleeping with Cats), and an author of fiction (17 novels.) Here’s a link to her website:  http://www.margepiercy.com/

Book Review: The Same Sweet Girls by Cassandra King

During the past couple of months I’ve read several novels that featured older women as protagonists. Yes, “older” is relative (usually ten years older than I am!) but in this case I mean women who have lived a good portion of their lives already. Not chick-lit heroines. These women have experienced disappointment along with joy. They know love isn’t always happily ever after and that love and lust are not necessarily the same thing (and they’re okay with that, for the most part).

What fun it’s been to read books with characters who have depth and experience and yet who are still interesting, still cantankerous, still full of life. I won’t claim that these stories changed my life, but they sure did make me laugh and nod my head in understanding.

The book I read most recently was The Same Sweet Girls by Cassandra King. Published in 2005, King tells the story of six women who became friends while attending the Methodist College for Women in Brierfield, Alabama. The group named themselves the Same Sweet Girls as a result of hearing a talk to the student body by Rosanelle Tilley, the reigning Maid of Cotton. After speaking for about an hour, she closed her speech by saying, “Even though I’ve been all around the world during my reign as National Maid of Cotton…and even though I’ve met with kings and queens and heads of state, I want all of you to know that I’m still the same sweet girl I’ve always been.” When the six women burst out laughing, they were removed from the auditorium and put on six weeks dorm restriction. During that enforced confinement, they got to know each other, bonded, and have remained close friends ever since. As Astor explains,“We had our first SSG reunion a year after graduation. That was over twenty-five years ago, and now we get together twice a year, the beach in the summer and the mountains in the fall.” Every year thereafter, they’ve crowned one of their members queen of the SSG’s, based on who has been the sweetest during the previous twelve months.

The thing I enjoyed most about the book was the author’s portrayal of lifelong friendships between women. Over the years, the diverse members of the group—which includes the First Lady of Alabama, a gourd artist, a nurse, and a retired dancer—support each other during illness, bad marriages, divorce, spousal abuse, and other disappointments. Their friendships, jealousies, and petty quarrels were presented in a realistic (and often humorous) way, yet I felt empathy for the challenges each woman faced. King’s use of Southern expressions and attitudes added color to her writing, as did her realistic portrayal of women approaching age fifty.

Here’s the synopsis of the book from King’s website:

None of the Same Sweet Girls are really girls anymore and none of them have actually ever been sweet. But this spirited group of Southern women, who have been holding biannual reunions ever since they were together in college, are nothing short of compelling.

There’s Julia Stovall, the First Lady of Alabama, who despite her public veneer, is a down-to-earth gal who only wants to know who her husband is sneaking out with late at night. There’s Lanier Sanders, whose husband won custody of their children after he found out about her fling with a colleague. Then there’s Astor Deveaux, a former Broadway showgirl who simply can’t keep her flirtations in check. And Corrine Cooper, whose incredible story comes to light as the novel unfolds.

Here’s a link to Cassanddra King’s website: http://www.cassandrakingconroy.com/