sMothering

by Wendy French

Genres: Romantic Comedy

Synopsis

First there was Bridget Jones. Then came the Nannies. Now meet Claire McLeod, a twenty-something American girl living in Portland, Oregon. Claire's got big problems: her mother's a tyrant, her sister's a lesbian, her father's in Omaha.

Claire's peaceful, if dull, existence is shattered when her mother arrives in Portland for an unexpected--and unwelcome--visit. Armed with a sharp tongue, a critical eye, and enough Weekender Wear to make anyone nervous, Mom has mysteriously left Dad at home in the Midwest. It's not enough that Claire's job as a telephone survey-taker is excruciatingly irritating and her boyfriend has dumped her. No, now, embarrassed by her dead-end job and flatlining love life, she must also bear the weight of Mom's critical eagle eye while trying to close the rift between her mother and her sister, solve the riddle of her missing father, climb a shaky corporate ladder, stalk a cute coworker, reinvent herself, and maybe--just maybe--find a little happiness.

By turns tender and insightful--but always hilariously funny--sMothering is a novel you can't put down.

At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Release date: April 1, 2007

Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

Print pages: 304

Sample

Mother comes to visit . . .

I could only hope that other mothers were like her, a combination of idiosyncrasies and careful manners, wrapped in a department store wardrobe of navy, black, and gray. Sensible shoes and pearl earrings. Restless hands and perennial hiccups.

I hoped that every mother was a knit-purl-knit-purl kind of woman, producing countless stitches of tiny sweater sleeves and collars for her nonexistent grandchildren, just in case.

I looked past her annoying habits with the practiced disdain of a twenty-three-year-old daughter; a roll of the eyes or an ambivalent shrug performed on cue. I looked past the feminine hygiene products cushioning the cardboard walls of her care packages and the spontaneous long-distance etiquette lessons, which usually took place on my dime. I could even look past her cheerful insistence that anything could be fixed with a strand of dental floss or a piece of slightly chewed gum and a little ingenuity.

What I couldn't look past was her presence in my doorway at seven-thirty on a Thursday morning, suitcase in hand.