Reconsidering Happiness: A Novel (Flyover Fiction) - Softcover

Flick, Sherrie

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0803225210 ISBN 13: 9780803225213

Publisher: Bison Books, 2009

Synopsis

The two silent Ss of Des Moines beckon twenty-three-year-old Vivette with a sexy finger, a promise. So, in the mid-1990s, she convinces Grandpa Joe-Joe to sell his Buick for twenty dollars, leaves behind her friends, her job at a hip New England bakery, and an affair with a married man, and moves to Iowa. Margaret, who left the same bakery years earlier on her own restless quest, offers pointers from her cautiously settled Nebraska life. In a story of lust and longing, love and loneliness, disappointment and desire stretching from the East Coast to the West, these two pioneering women navigate through secrets, lies, decisions, and compromises shared over pool tables, postcards, and shots of whiskey. Starting up, starting over, slowing down, they crisscross each other’s lives like highways on a map, always escaping, flying toward a dreamt future, and trying to avoid the charted course.

About this title

About the Author

Sherrie Flick is author of the flash fiction chapbook I Call This Flirting and the short story collection Whiskey, Etc., a bronze prize winner for the Foreword INDIES best short story collection of 2017. Her work has appeared in many literary journals and anthologies including Ploughshares, Flash Fiction Forward, and New Sudden Fiction. A recipient of a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowship and residencies from Ucross, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Atlantic Center for the Arts, she teaches in the MFA and Food Studies programs at Chatham University in Pittsburgh and serves as co-director of the Chautauqua Writers' Festival. 
 

From Publishers Weekly

To break off an affair with a married man, 23-year-old Vivette takes her grandfather's Buick and drives away from her home in Portsmouth, N.H., heading for Des Moines, Iowa, for no other reason than the attraction of its two silent ss. On the way she spends a week in Nebraska with Margaret, who Vivette met when they both worked at the Penhallow Bakery in Portsmouth. Margaret, who also fled heartbreak, is married now and settled down, and Vivette seeks pointers on life in the Great Plains. From chapter to chapter, the story shifts between Vivette and Margaret and between the past and present, gradually revealing the details of their involvement with the untrustworthy men they left behind. In her descriptions of food, the Nebraskan landscape, and the rhythms of work at a tourist town bakery, Flick indulges in sensual detail with pleasurable results. But the novel lacks drama; Vivette and Margaret have little to do but ruminate on happiness and their past waywardness. Later chapters revealing the current circumstances of their former lovers adds little insight. (Sept.)
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About this edition

• Publisher: Bison Books
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0803225210
• ISBN 13: 9780803225213
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 208