Absent a Miracle
A Novel
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
An ex–talk show host, her cheating husband, and a plot to canonize a friend's Nicaraguan aunt make for "pure, unadulterated adulterous entertainment" (The New York Times).
Lapsed Catholic Alice Fairweather is searching for meaning. Having lost her ideal job as a radio talk show host who interprets dreams, hopelessly in love with a husband who loves too many other women, and stuck in upstate New York with her sons and dogs, one of whom is ill, her life isn't exactly what she envisioned as a young girl. So when Abelardo, her husband's former roommate, comes to visit on a quest to make his aunt the first Nicaraguan saint, it feels like a sign.
Suddenly, Alice finds herself on a madcap mission to canonize a woman she's never met, becoming intimately acquainted with the history of female sainthood, striking up an odd friendship with the eccentric head of New York's hagiography club, and traveling to Nicaragua on a last-minute flight.
Equal parts moving and hilarious, Absent a Miracle is a quirky and sharp look at love, loss, identity, faith, marriage, and—of course—sainthood.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Alice Fairweather, a Californian transplanted to the New York City suburbs with her Harvard-educated, Maine-born husband and their two precocious sons, undergoes a major transformation in Lehner's unpleasantly overstuffed latest. An unexpected visit from her husband's college roommate, Abelardo Llobet Carvajal, who is seeking to canonize his great aunt, sets Alice on a journey to Nicaragua. Although the author has imbued her characters with charming eccentricities husband Waldo is an inventor with a fondness for limericks; one son, Henry, tends to speak in thesaurus-ese ("hypogeal" and "egregious"); the other son, Ezra, lives "fully in his sleep"; and Alice has an interest in dreams that parlays into a part-time radio hosting job where she interprets callers' dreams there is a bewildering lack of depth and connection between the characters, who come across mainly as anthropomorphized collections of quirks. Add in an unwieldy plot that includes marital infidelity, dream interpretation, the exigencies of upper-crust life in Maine, the obstacles to canonization, Nicaraguan politics, coffee-bean farming, suicide, Catholic guilt, snow blindness and canine blood donation, and you've got something of an unholy mess that never quite pulls itself together.
