Ready to Fall: A Novel - Softcover

Cook, Claire

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1882593480 ISBN 13: 9781882593484

Publisher: Bridgeworks, 2002

Synopsis

A witty tale of marriage and midlife longing, as a taken-for-granted wife pursues a fantasy love via e-mail.

About this title

From the Inside Flap:

Where can a 40-ish woman turn when her marriage has gone stale and her kids treat her like an unpaid chauffeur? In Beth Riordan's case, it's to cyberspace. She takes a zany romp with love through wry, revelatory e-mails to Thomas, her handsome neighbor in a New England suburb, a travel writer in the middle of a divorce.

Although the families have not previously been close, Thomas asks Beth to attend to his pet rabbits while he is away researching a new travel guide. Beth begins to confide her own unhappiness in a series of poignant yet funny e-mails to Thomas while he is on the road. Nothing in Beth Riordan's life is about her. She drives her daughters to endless swim practices. Her husband no longer notices her. Her best friend is self-absorbed. The baby of the family is 10 and needs her less every day.

Thomas replies cautiously at first to Beth's stories of truck drivers who ignore her for her nubile daughters, family conversations that repeatedly fail to focus on her needs, a week-long excursion to a self-discovery camp with a feminist girl friend. When Thomas returns from his trip, longing and love, family and friendship combine to produce a climax that surprise Beth and the reader alike.

Readers will chuckle in recognition at this contemporary look at marriage and mid-life longing, written in e-mail format.

From Publishers Weekly:

"I feel as if the only time anyone even talks to me is to complain or criticize or to place an order for something they need," laments frustrated wife and mother Beth Riordan in this debut novel of frustrated domesticity. Indeed, Cook gives ample proof at the outset that Beth's husband Pete and children Margot, 14, Chloe, 13, and PJ, 10, notice Beth only when they run out of coffee or toilet paper. But Beth finds a secret way to make her life exciting. In between driving the kids to predawn swim practices, keeping the household running and working as a freelance quotation researcher, Beth starts an e-mail friendship with travel writer Thomas Marsh, her older neighbor, whose wife has recently left him. (She is Swimslave; he is Wanderlust.) Soon their e-correspondence escalates to e-flirtation, and the tension of whether or not their budding relationship will be consummated keeps the plot going at a decent clip. While the premise is entirely believable--lonely, insecure housewife living in a pokey Boston suburb pours out her heart electronically--the plot takes several contrived, unrealistic turns. Beth signs up for an expensive female-bonding wilderness week, but when the group arrives at their secluded island, she whines about the lack of air conditioning. The adolescent tone persists, ending at Beth's high school reunion when she walks out of the bathroom with toilet paper hanging out of the back of her pants. Despite its cliched elements, the narrative has some witty scenes of domestic miscommunication, and Cook's perky take on midlife angst will undoubtedly appeal to women who fantasize about changing their lives. (May)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Bridgeworks
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 1882593480
• ISBN 13: 9781882593484
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 200