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Summary
Summary
Mattie Ryder is a marvelously funny, well-intentioned, religious, sarcastic, tender, angry, and broke recently divorced mother of two young children. Then she finds a small rubber blue shoe-the kind you might get from a gumball machine-and a few other trifles that were left years ago in her deceased father's car. They seem to hold the secrets to her messy upbringing, and as she and her brother follow these clues to uncover the mystery of their past, she begins to open her heart to her difficult, brittle mother and the father she thought she knew. And with that acceptance comes an opening up to the possibilities of romantic love. In a disarming blend of everyday life and the sublime, of reverence and irreverence, and of humor and grace, Anne Lamott speaks directly to our most closely held concerns, bringing comfort to anyone -all of us-whose family life can feel overwhelming and uncontainable. Lamott's formidable storytelling gifts have gained her a large and passionate following, and anybody who has experienced the delightful humor and the canny understanding of her previous work will be similarly charmed by Blue Shoe.
Author Notes
Anne Lamott was born on April 10, 1954 in San Francisco, California. She began writing when she returned to California after spending two years at Goucher College, but her early efforts, mostly short stories, met with little success. The turning point in her writing came with a family crisis, when her father was diagnosed with brain cancer. She wrote a series of short pieces about the traumatic effect that serious illness has on a family. These pieces were published, and they eventually became the basis of her first novel, Hard Laughter, published in 1980.
During the 1980s, she wrote three additional novels, Rosie, Joe Jones and All New People. In 1989, her life took another turn when her son was born. Her next book, published in 1993, was a non-fiction effort called Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year. She wrote ironically, but candidly, about her struggles to adjust to her new role as a mother and a single parent, and her experiences with everything from sleep deprivation to financial and emotional uncertainty to concerns about what she would tell her son when he was old enough to ask about his absent father.
Operating Instructions proved to be even more successful than her novels, and led to interviews on network news programs and a regular spot on National Public Radio. Her other works include Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life; Crooked Little Heart; Blue Shoe, Imperfect Birds, and Some Assembly Required: A Journal of My Son's First Son. Her title Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers made The New York Times Best Seller List for 2012. Her title Stitches: A Handbook on Meaning, Hope and Repair and Small Victories: Spotting Improbable Moments of Grace also made The New York Times Best Seller List.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Memoirist and novelist Lamott (Operating Instructions; Crooked Little Heart, etc.) brilliantly captures the dilemma of a divorced woman from the so-called "sandwich generation" in her latest, a funny, poignant and occasionally gut-wrenching novel that tracks the efforts of Mattie Ryder to cope with her divorce, find a new man, deal with her mother's aging and restore the emotional equilibrium of her two young children. The divorce dominates in the early going as Mattie continues to sleep with her sexy but egotistical ex-husband, Nick, even though his new romance with a younger woman is clipping along at a sprightly pace. Meanwhile, Mattie grows close to a married friend named Daniel, who also feels a romantic pull although he's happily married. Mattie's feisty mother, Isa, ages precipitously and becomes increasingly disoriented, leading to a series of calamities. Mattie's touching relationships with her kids, two-year-old Ella and difficult but sensitive six-year-old Harry, become the emotional anchor for the novel, and narrative momentum is provided by the gradual unfolding of a family secret, which reveals the infidelities of Mattie's late father. Most of the comedy is of the domestic variety, and Lamott continually displays her gift for finding the right combination of humor and small but significant revelations in ordinary moments. The ensemble cast is another major strength of the book, providing a backdrop against which Mattie, Daniel, Isa and the children emerge as powerful and memorable individuals. Lamott has explored similar terrain in her earlier works, but the scope and freshness of this novel could make it a breakout work for her. Agents, Sarah Chalfant and Andrew Wylie, the Wylie Agency. (Oct.) Forecast: Lamott is better known as a bestselling writer of memoirs and nonfiction than as a novelist, but Blue Shoe-a featured selection of the Doubleday Book Club and BOMC, and an alternate selection of the Literary Guild-is poised to even the score. The writer's many devoted fans are sure to pack her readings on a 10-city author tour. Audio rights to Brilliance Audio; foreign rights sold in Germany and Greece. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
Lamott infuses this peripatetic story of a woman's struggles after a divorce with the same quirky brand of Christianity she explored in her wildly popular memoir, Traveling Mercies (1999). When Mattie finally accepts that her marriage to the charming but unfaithful Nicholas is over, she moves her two children, Harry (six) and Ella (two), back into the house where she grew up because it's free: conveniently, her mother, still intimidatingly energetic and competent at 72, has paid off the mortgage and decamped to an apartment. Over the next four years, Mattie goes through all the familiar rites of divorce: anger, longing, desperation, slow recovery to strength, and new love. Her children bring her solace even as they drive her crazy (Lamott is the master of domestic detail): Ella's nail-chewing, Harry's bouts of temper, as well as moments of tenderness are rendered with casual perfection. The description of the failed marriage itself, however, is generic, and Mattie's sense of blamelessness in its collapse sets up a self-righteous tone not masked by self-deprecating humor, a Lamott trademark. Mattie prays her way out of bad feelings, and her religion weaves its way throughout, helping her cope as complications arise-which they do. She sleeps with her ex even after his girlfriend moves in and has a baby. She finds clues that her lovable father, a lawyer and liberal activist who died 20 years earlier, had a dark side. Her mother's mind and body begin a slow, painful slide into senescence. Mattie's dog dies. And then there is Daniel. We know he'll become Mattie's soulmate when he can't bring himself to kill the rats he's been hired to eradicate from Mattie's infested house. While Daniel resists her attraction because he's married, she takes him to her church (his wife is a nonbeliever), and they become best friends to a degree that would threaten the most secure spouse. Lots of charm in the details, not much for momentum.
Booklist Review
In a convoluted story filled with improbable plotlines and impossible circumstances, the chance discovery of a tiny blue plastic shoe, a child's prize from a gumball machine, leads to the unraveling of a long-buried family mystery and reveals the equally mysterious workings of faith, family, and friendship. Lamott returns to her favorite themes in her portrayal of Mattie Ryder, a harried single mother blessed with two precocious children, stressed by a feisty but frail mother, involved with a married man, and burdened with the legacy of her deceased father's adulterous life. Anxiety and infidelity, rejection and betrayal--substantial subjects all, and ones that Lamott treats with boundless grace and compassion but with precious little of the luminous lyricism or wry wisdom for which she is known and loved. When she's at the top of her game, Lamott stands dreadlocked-head and shoulders above the competition, with her slightly skewed observations that still somehow manage to hit their mark with pinpoint accuracy and her trademark "Oh, God, I wish I'd said that" one-liners. But readers who have eagerly anticipated a new Lamott novel may be disappointed, and those wishing to try Lamott for the first time would do well to start with her earlier works because, sadly, her latest offers only occasional glimpses of her usual brilliance. In her last regular Salon column, Lamott signed off by explaining that God told her it was time to write a new novel; one can't help but wish they'd had a slightly longer conversation. --Carol Haggas
Library Journal Review
Lamott's use of language allows us to see the smallest details from a fresh perspective, and her stories of motherhood and faith never fail to entertain and move us, all within the tightly wound ball of a good literary yarn. Her seventh novel (after Crooked Little Heart) stars Mattie Ryder, the mother of two, who's left her wandering husband and moved into the ramshackle house of her difficult mother. Mattie has a lot of things to figure out. After serendipitously coming across some old trinkets that belonged to her dead father (including a little blue rubber shoe from a gumball machine), Mattie is drawn into the past to discover the truth about her dad. At the same time, her demanding mother is failing and probably needs to go into a nursing home. And when the house is overrun by rats, the pest-control people send Daniel, who has a ponytail and "closely set brown eyes that made him look like an incompetent bird of prey." What turns into friendship could, for Mattie, be love. Lamott uses offbeat, descriptive language (e.g., vibrational and snorfled), and her story is as good as her funky turn of a phrase. For most popular fiction collections. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 6/1/02; BOMC featured selection and Literary Guild alternate selection.]-Beth Gibbs, Davidson, NC (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.