The Dearly Departed
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
With her trademark humor and warmth, the beloved author of Ms. Demeanor and Every Tom, Dick & Harry explores what it means to return home and find light in the dark corners of one's inhospitable past in a dazzling novel about golf, love, and DNA.
Everyone in King George, New Hampshire, loved Margaret Batten, part-time amateur actress, full-time wallflower, and single mother to a now-distant daughter, Sunny. But accidents happen. The death of Margaret, side by side with her putative fiancé, brings Sunny back to the scene of the unhappy adolescence she thought she’d left behind. Reentry is to be dreaded; there’s no hiding in a town with one diner, one doctor, one stop sign, one motel. Yet allies surface; even high school tormentors have grown up in unforeseen and gratifying ways. Just possibly, Sunny begins to think, she wasn’t as beleaguered as she felt she was. And maybe her mother’s life was richer than anyone suspected. Add to the mix a chief of police whose interest in Sunny exceeds his civic duty, and you have the makings of an irresistibly beguiling tale from an author who writes with all the wit and wry authority of a latter-day Jane Austen.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Lipman (The Ladies Man) sets her breezy, workmanlike novel in King George, N.H., a small town where the sudden accidental deaths of a secretly engaged couple summon their two grown-up children to sort out the conundrum of their relation to each other. Both the dead woman's stoical daughter, Sunny Batten, and the man's cranky son, Fletcher Finn, possess an identical corona of satiny gray hair; both are 31; and neither has ever met the other, although their parents have been on-and-off lovers for years. Sunny, who lives in New York, grew up with her mother in King George, and as a girl was a serious golfer. Fletcher, who grew up in Pennsylvania, has just gotten himself fired as campaign manager to Emily Ann Grandjean, an annoying, anorexic rich-girl candidate in a New Jersey congressional race. One look at Sunny and Fletcher's resemblance to each other at the funeral and the town is abuzz with conjecture and benign gossip. Novelist Lipman, who knows from smalltown, confidently enters the head of everyone worth meeting in King George: chief of police Joey Loach, who survives a gunshot thanks to his mother's insistence that he wear a bulletproof vest; Sunny's former best friend, Regina, who married the captain of the golf team; and the waitress at the Dot, Winnie, who keeps tabs on everyone. After the initial plot is pleasantly sketched out, the work feels thin, and Lipman resorts to repetitious dialogue and switches in narrative voice to keep the action moving. Major characters like Sunny and Emily Ann begin to sound alike, and Fletcher's initial, endearing prickliness smoothes out predictably to allow Lipman to tidily tie up the ends of this unremarkable, occasionally humorous, mostly conventional light comedy. 12-city author tour.
