Elizabeth the First Wife
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3.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Elizabeth Lancaster, an English professor at Pasadena City College, finds her perfectly dull but perfectly orchestrated life upended one summer by three men: her movie-star ex-husband, a charming political operative, and William Shakespeare. Until now, she’d been content living in the shadow of her high-profile and highly accomplished family. Then her college boyfriend and one-time husband of seventeen months, A-list action star FX Fahey, shows up with a job offer that she can’t resist, and Elizabeth’s life suddenly gets a whole lot more interesting. She’s off to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival for the summer to make sure FX doesn’t humiliate himself in an avant-garde production of A Midsummer Night's Dream.
As she did so skillfully with her first novel, Helen of Pasadena, which spent more than a year on the Los Angeles Times bestseller list, Lian Dolan spins a lively, smart, and very funny tale of a woman reinventing her life in unexpected ways.
Lian Dolan is also the co-author of The Satellite Sisters' Uncommon Senses. As part of the Satellite Sisters, Lian and her four sisters found national acclaim first on NPR, then on ABC Radio and XM Satellite Radio. She also creates the popular podcast and blog Chaos Chronicles.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The breezy style of Dolan's Helen of Pasadena here carries over to Elizabeth Lancaster, a Shakespeare teacher at Pasadena Community College. Although her father is a Nobel Prize winner, her mother is an obsessive organizer, one sister is married to a California gubernatorial candidate, and another sister is a physician, Elizabeth is content with her life until her ex-husband, now a famous movie star, walks into her classroom. FX Fahey, hired to do live theater at the Ashland Oregon Shakespeare Festival, wants to hire Elizabeth as his literary advisor. She accepts the offer and takes her teenaged niece along as her intern. The Ashland scene clearly shows the rift between classical Shakespeare and Hollywood when the director wants full nudity in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Elizabeth, desperate to save face, manages some modification in the production which, unfortunately, isn't enough to prevent her entire family from entering the fray. Dolan, a Pasadena resident, knows her territory as she writes of gifted children, obsessions with clothing, food, and public image. But Elizabeth comes off more like Bridget Jones than an adult Shakespearean professor. In spite of the snarky style the pace lags, and the one-dimensional characters and feel-good Hollywood ending make this standard airport fare.
