Everything Is Just Fine
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
In this brilliant, laugh-out-loud satire, named one of Washington Independent Review of Books Favorite Books of 2019, image-conscious parents on a Beverly Hills junior soccer team struggle to keep up appearances as their private lives careen out of control.
"You'll wince, laugh out loud, relate to, and relish this unsparing satirical send up."---Wednesday Martin, New York Times bestselling author
Coach Randy is working mightily to keep it together, and not simply with his vaguely unhappy wife, distant child, and a new boss who's eliminating half the sales force. This season's soccer parents are a demanding bunch. Diane's wine-fueled group e-mails are almost unintelligible; team mom Jacqui's enthusiasm for the league verges on manic; a divorced couple can barely conceal their murderous rage at each other; and another mom is laser-focused on schooling everyone on what constitutes a healthy snack option.
All the secrets and lies bubbling below the surface of their membrane-thin civility threaten to combust when Alejandro, a young, foreign assistant coach refuses to play by the Beverly Hills code, which is to mind your own business and don't look too deeply into anyone's soul. Especially your own.
Brett Paesel brings hilarity and huge heart to a world that looks enviable and shiny on the outside but is, in truth, filled with aching for connection on the inside. In the vein of Perotta and Semple, everyday life in Paesel's deft rendering is anything but.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Actor, producer, and writer Paesel (Mommies Who Drink) sets her snarky sucker punch of a fiction debut in the heads and on the laptops of a bunch of prickly soccer parents in Beverly Hills. Much of the story is epistolary, moving forward through an email chain set off by Coach Randy to the parents of his team of needy, 10-year-old boys. Randy, who has lost his sales job (a fact that his wife doesn't know), sends inspirational messages that are funny but fraught. Team mom Jacqui weighs in with her own emails, often subtly undermining what Randy has to say, and hers are followed by comments from other moms and dads laden with anger and passive aggression. Diane, a mother who has recently split from her husband, drunkenly emails sassy retorts and then is usually sorry, until Randy begins to confide in her. Meanwhile, the team's skills coach, Alejandro, seduces a couple of the mothers on the team. It's all funny until the threats to marriages and lives become impossible to ignore, and one of the boys must use a hidden talent to save the day. Though the reader might wish for more of a sense of place these soccer fields could be anywhere from Cincinnati to El Cajon Paesel's book is compulsively readable, an unforgiving portrait of a spoiled generation of contemporary American parents.