This story takes place in the Pacific Northwest, my home ground. It's very very funny, and I enjoyed it thoroughly ... listened to it as an audiobook. The author describes people and places so well that I thought I could see them and hear them.
When her husband is offered a post at a small university, Maye Roberts is only too happy to pack up and leave the relentless Phoenix heat for the lush green quietude of Spaulding, Washington. She's a freelance writer, and works at home, so making new friends is quite a challenge.
Spaulding is a quintessential college hippie town, laid-back and full of quirky characters. The town is founded on a sewer pipe manufacturing company, though it's been closed for years now. The big annual event is the Sewer Pipe Festival, complete with the crowning of a queen. This is a recycling, no-meat-eating town, and Maye resorts to telling lies to find friends. This, she reflects, is earning her places in the different degrees of hell. There's an intermediate hell where one is forced to live out eternity in Wal-Mart "the day after Thanksgiving as shoppers jostled, pushed and rubbed against her to secure the cheapest things hellishly possible, while their children, also known as demi-demons, cried, screamed, and begged for hell's cuisine, corn dogs and Mountain Dew."
After narrow escapes from a coven of witches, a cult of vegetarians (she loves a good steak) and an alcoholic who humiliates her on a friend-date, she decides to enter the town's Sewer Pipe Queen pageant in hopes this will help her attract friends.
Spaulding is a quintessential college hippie town, laid-back and full of quirky characters. The town is founded on a sewer pipe manufacturing company, though it's been closed for years now. The big annual event is the Sewer Pipe Festival, complete with the crowning of a queen. This is a recycling, no-meat-eating town, and Maye resorts to telling lies to find friends. This, she reflects, is earning her places in the different degrees of hell. There's an intermediate hell where one is forced to live out eternity in Wal-Mart "the day after Thanksgiving as shoppers jostled, pushed and rubbed against her to secure the cheapest things hellishly possible, while their children, also known as demi-demons, cried, screamed, and begged for hell's cuisine, corn dogs and Mountain Dew."
After narrow escapes from a coven of witches, a cult of vegetarians (she loves a good steak) and an alcoholic who humiliates her on a friend-date, she decides to enter the town's Sewer Pipe Queen pageant in hopes this will help her attract friends.
1 comment:
This sounds great! And I'm glad it is a book, not you. :<)
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