Half Changed World

Last week, when I checked my email, I found a message from someone in the publicity department at Random House that began:

Hi Elizabeth, I hope you’re doing well.  Just checking in on Maria Lennon’s debut novel, MAKING IT UP AS I GO ALONG (Shaye Areheart Books, June 14, 2005); Publishers Weekly just called it, “A winning mix of humor and suspense.” It is a is a funny, sophisticated, and refreshingly original story about doing what feels right, versus the “right thing.”  I look forward to hearing from you soon about a possible piece on your site.  I’d love to send you a copy of the novel and get you in touch with Maria.  Please let me know where you would like materials sent. 

I don’t know how they came across my blog — perhaps they noticed that I had promoted The Truth Behind the Mommy Wars — but I was flattered.  The description of the book they offered screamed Mommy Lit at me — but as Jennifer Weiner points out, there are worse things in the world than to be entertaining.  So, I said, sure, send it to me; I’ll give it a read.

Unfortunately, I thought it was pretty bad.  If I hadn’t felt obligated to keep going since they sent me a free book, I probably wouldn’t have gotten past the first page, which includes the following lines:

"There was nothing in my thirty-eight years that had prepared me for the beauty of a sleeping child in the arms of its mother.  It was the face of joy and peace, as though the baby was wrapped in a shroud of faith and its soul was dancing with the angels."

Ack.  I’m also afraid that Ms. Lennon took too literally Anne Lamott’s advice from Bird by Bird that if you’re basing an unpleasant male character on a real person, you should give him a tiny penis so he won’t recognize himself.

But there’s a bigger problem with the book. The Booklist review excerpted at Amazon says that the two halves of the story — one set amid the civil war in Sierra Leone, one among rich SAHMs in Southern California — are "too disjointed to be complete."  I think that’s being kind.  If this is meant to be a frothy book about the excesses of the rich and insecure, then it’s sick to throw in a bit about child mutilations for exotic color.  And if, in the face of the suffering of war, even the main character "could not bear to read about her [friend’s] sleepless nights over the right preschool for Jeremiah or her thoughts on Cheerios as finger food," why should we, the readers, want to read about these for several hundred pages?

(Think I’ll ever get another publisher contacting me to read a new book?)

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