From Publishers Weekly
The annals of love have recorded many a humiliating breakup over the years, but Alison Hopkins gets hit with a humdinger in this surprising, touching and hilariously deadpan debut novel. When she sends her live-in boyfriend Tom to the supermarket right before a dinner party, she figures the worst that can happen is that he'll get the wrong mustard. Instead he calls from a pay phone to tell her he's not coming back at all, because he's fallen in love with his college sweetheart, Kate Pearce—with whom he's been sleeping for five months. If Alison were a
Sex and the City siren, she'd distract herself with martinis, Manolos and misappropriated men, but she's a broke columnist for the floundering weekly
The Philadelphia Times. Plus, though now lapsed, she was raised evangelist Christian. So it's a new pair of hiking boots, pie-contest judging and furtive dalliances with a coworker for reluctant good-girl Alison as she tries to gauge the ins and outs of the single world that non-fundamentalists mastered in their early 20s. Alison's struggles to fit into the mainstream world are fresh and full of wisdom, and Dunn's humor is marvelously dry: "Bonnie had a sudden flash of what he might come up with on his own…so she drew a picture on a cocktail napkin of a wide band of channel-set diamonds, and she wrote down the words 'platinum' and 'size six' and 'BIG' and 'SOON.' " This is a delightful exploration of the empowerment that comes from escaping a Big Love turned Bad Love.
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Allison Hopkins is a 21st-century urban neurotic, a former evangelical Christian whose live-in boyfriend has left her for another woman. Her anger, her religious confusion, and her maudlin desperation for a happy ending are the troublesome trivia she tries to sort through. Narrator Eliza Foss has a pleasant reading style and an impressive vocal range for characterizations. She attempts to keep things upbeat, although the lack of subtleties in the text forces Foss to work a little too hard. The result is a performance that is frequently over the top. Some genuinely funny writing laces this cross between "Friends" and "Sex in the City," but if it's true that there's nothing more important to 30-something women than procreation, then the Women's Movement was a big bust. S.J.H. © AudioFile 2004, Portland, Maine--
Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine
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by Sarah Dunn
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