"Two months after the move into the expensive lakefront property, Nick left me for a guy he'd met on Gay.com" The same week, "a partially inebriated youth lost control of his vehicle, skidded into my lane and smacked my little VW beetle head-on. . . I was broke and broken. Clocked in the chops by a lead glove. I was out cold. What the hell -- it was so bad it couldn't get any worse. Bring on the Borscht! So after healing in Michigan for two months, I went home for the holidays."
From the beginning of the first chapter we are drawn into her family and culture. "For my father, belief in cell phones was somehow optional." And, "One of the best things about my mother is that she will follow you anywhere, conversationally speaking. She will answer any question at all, the stranger the better. Naturally, I cannot resist asking her things that no normal person would accept." And later, of her niece and brother, "Phoebe looked like a professional dancer up there on stage, all the softness of childhood stretched taut, all the roundness worn away to a flicker of muscle across her fierce slim shoulders, while Aaron sat immobile, opaque as a Buddha. But it spoke volumes that this man, who knew nothing about dance and who had probably never danced a step in his own life, was prepared to go without a second car so that his daughter could ripple like water."
When her story is complete, we are left with a desire to spend more time in her family and community, knowing that what was once foreign to us is now a little more comfortable and understanding that intertwined in all of the culture that made her feel "different" from the "rest of the kids" is the same delightful strangeness that makes up all extended families and communities.
All in all, club members rated their journey into Janzen's world as time well spent, giving it a 3.5. Her humor was a little edgy, sparing no one and more than once continuing past the "it's cute (chuckle)" stage to the "oh, come on; we get it!" stage. That said, there are parts of this book that really are laugh out loud funny. But we found ourselves somehow unable to warm to her personally. She has hidden well beneath a veneer of humor and sophistication and in so doing has made herself and her world smaller.