Lessons in Survival [Hardcover]

Dunaway's latest (after the beguiling Borrowed Lives ) is an overambitious and bluntly unromantic tale of a mixed-up child- and adulthood. Narrator Blue Erhart, a 32-year-old high school biology teacher, has a notorious past: her parents were hippie bank robbers who followed the Robin Hood ethic and were sent to prison after Blue bought an ice cream cone with a marked bill. Nineteen years later, their sentences are served, and Blue, who stopped visiting them when her mother turned down parole on principle, can no longer fathom the role of daughter. And with good reason. Her folks aren't just quirky, they're downright unpleasant. When Blue first catches up with them at a dingy apartment, her mother answers the door stark naked and cracks jokes about homophobia. Besides having to contend with such oddities, Blue also spends time dodging reporters, fending off an aspiring movie producer who wants the rights to her story and pursuing Thomas Q, the messianic subject of her dissertation. That a small-time filmmaker is curious about Blue seems credible, but it's a stretch to believe that paparazzi spend hours each day monitoring her apartment. Blue is too gruff to win over readers (making love with her ex-husband, biology-minded Blue imagines the dust mites that inhabit the carpet.) Readers are more punished than rewarded for perseverance as Dunaway's sitcom-ish material slips out of her grasp.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Divorced high school biology teacher Blue Erhart leads a quiet, conventional life until her notorious bank-robbing parents are released from prison. Hounded by the press and TV-movie producers, she goes on the lam, much as she did in her youth with her fugitive Mom and Dad. Led largely by her libido, Blue leaps from Rush, a sometime Hollywood agent, to cult-leader Thomas Q, the subject of her master's thesis. Her quest for identity and renewed focus gets pretty frenetic, and her parents' continuing lust for robbing banks doesn't help. But, just in time, true love finds a way, and Blue and Rush live happily ever after. Not as clever and refreshing as Dunaway's first book, Borrowed Lives ( LJ 10/15/92), this is nonetheless very innovative, entertaining, and itself a prime candidate for a TV movie. Recommended. --Susan Clifford, Hughes Aircraft Co., Los Angeles
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A winsome California divorc‚e's devastatingly normal life is blown sky-high with the news that her bank-robber parents, who donated half of each withdrawal to charity, are finally getting out of prison. Not that Blue Erhardt's life is all that normal to begin with. A biology teacher, she's preoccupied with the swarming micro-organisms living and dead to whom she's constantly comparing herself; she's carried off to a lovemaking session with her ex-husband Lewis in handcuffs and reaches orgasm amid reveries of dust mites. But things change for good, or bad, when a judge knocks a year off the sentences of her parents, Harold and Naomi Henderson, and turns them loose on Blue. Reporters besiege her; would-be agent Rush Poundstone schemes to sign her to a movie contract; and the ``Counterculture Bonnie and Clyde,'' pausing only long enough to tell her that it was her fault they got arrested 20 years ago, promptly set off on a new rash of robberies. Despite the news that Blue hasn't visited her parents in ten years, ever since Naomi refused to accept parole--and motherhood- -to serve out her husband's term, Dunaway (Borrowed Lives, 1992, etc.) seems determined to keep the couple in the background, as if skirting a subject too delicate to broach directly; by their fifth new-and- improved holdup (now they're using live ammunition), Blue's taken off for The Bend, an Arizona resort whose quixotic paterfamilias, Thomas Q, she plans to interview for her dissertation in religious studies, and long before a climactic fire and (still another) bank job bring her story to an end, that story's taken a backseat to a string of increasingly gnomic revelations about life. Like what? Like ``Love is part of our survival technique...If we don't accept that, we become extinct.'' Blue's a lot more fun when she's playing hooky from herself. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From the widely-acclaimed author of Borrowed Lives comes a hilarious, offbeat story of a woman forced to face her unusual upbringing. Trapped in the spotlight of unwanted fame, Blue Erhardt must make some life-changing decisions in this clever and uniquely plotted novel.