Children of God Go Bowling
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4.4 • 5 Ratings
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- $8.99
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
We first met Shannon Olson—our semi-fictional heroine—in the witty and engaging Welcome to My Planet. Olson pioneered a daring new genre, a kind of fictional documentary, pulling no punches by using her own name, and engaging readers with her wry and direct style. In Children of God, Shannon is in her mid-thirties and besieged by reminders that her life doesn’t look much at all like the American Dream, nor like her aquarium-stocking, furniture-buying peers. She embarks upon a self-improvement campaign, joining group therapy, blind dating, and trying to convince herself to fall in love with an old college chum. Shannon even gives organized religion a go. With encore performances by Flo (called “one of the great moms of American fiction” by Garrison Keillor), this is the hilarious and poignant tale of a woman making her life happen when it didn’t quite happen for her.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Chick lit? More like curmudgeon lit and it couldn't be funnier in this wry, quirky sequel to Welcome to My Planet (Where English Is Sometimes Spoken). Thirty-something Shannon Olson, who shares her name with the author, is napping her way through life in her native Minneapolis, kvetching with her equally stymied friends and dabbling in group therapy. She envies her married-and-settled siblings and longs to break away from her parents but how to develop her own identity when she's still doing laundry at her folks' and sharing every detail of her life with her mother, the indomitable Flo? Her romantic prospects look bleak, too: "I had been living in the dating world's version of the Old Country Buffet.... The tepid, lamp-warmed, greasy, convenient, heartburn-inducing singles buffet." With so few possibilities, her dearest friend from college, Adam, starts to look less like her favorite couch potato companion and more like the love of her life or is it only boredom drawing her to him? This is no paint-by-numbers tale of woe; while Shannon herself shies from action, the plot is one twist after another, and the humor (especially the group therapy scenes) is hilarious. Eschewing much of the chirpiness and lagging introspection of many of its sisters, Olson's novel explores deeper questions of why many young adults find themselves acting like adolescents into their 30s and offers an insightful examination of friendship and family. Strong, ironic and characteristically cranky prose keeps the pages turning, and Shannon's commentary on being a round peg in a square world guiltily Catholic in a world of cheery Lutherans, grumpy and single in a city clogged with strollers and Midwestern cheer rings true.
