From Booklist
In this fitting companion to her wry and witty novels, Cooper treats us to 17 stories full of irony, compassion, pathos, and humor. Her centerpiece is "Ilsa's War," in which an elderly Jewish woman shares her story with a writer house-sitting in a tiny English village. Her funniest story concerns an afternoon tea given by a lesbian and her "poofter" (gay male) roommate for her co-worker at a London "buti" preschool and the woman's Dennis-the-Menace grandson; the totally charmed grandmum leaves with the little terror remodeled into a diminutive Boy George. Other stories, too, involve interplay between children and the elderly. A grandmother assigns the guardians in "I Believe in Angels"; an elderly woman who claims "the five senses seduced us into life" recounts her past incarnations in "Time after Time"; and grandmother and granddaughter face the defeat represented by an oil slick on their beloved beach in "Early One Morning." Cooper's characters quest for knowledge and find that everything has a price.
Marie Kuda
Product Description
This collection of stories by the author of "Jay Loves Lucy" features a variety of women who are prone to flights of fancy. They include a sculptress, who moulds her philandering husband into works of art with frightening results, and a girl who takes angels as her guardians and friends.
