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Summary
Summary
From the bestselling author of The Elegant Gathering of White Snows comes a poignant, outrageous, refreshingly liberating story about one woman whose life takes an unexpected turn....
Meg Fratano has just witnessed the unthinkable- her husband of twenty-seven years making love to another woman. In her bed. And all Meg wanted to do was watch. Quietly, secretly, watch. Then she realized her life would never be the same.
Meg isn't sure what she wants, but she knows it's not what she had. After almost three decades of marriage and two children, she has finally awakened to how unhappy she is.
Now, with the help of friends old and new, and even her teenage daughter-a former brat who has blossomed into a startlingly wise young woman-Meg just might break through the chains of everyone's expectations for her and find the strength to take the first step on her own path. To strip away a lifetime of inhibitions. To dance naked at the edge of dawn...
Author Notes
Kris Radish is the bestselling author of four novels, The Elegant Gathering of White Snows , Dancing Naked at the Edge of Dawn, Annie Freeman's Fabulous Traveling Funeral, and The Sunday List of Dreams . She lives in Wisconsin, where she writes two nationally syndicated columns each week and is at work on her sixth novel, The Poetry of Emma's Salvation .
Reviews (2)
Kirkus Review
Woman on the verge of self-realization hits the road, in the second of this ilk by DBR Media syndicated columnist Radish (The Elegant Gathering of White Snows, 2002). Meg Fratano's comfortable suburban world explodes when she glimpses her husband Bob in flagrante delicto with a woman sporting geranium-hued toenails. Appalled by her initial voyeuristic reaction, she seeks solace and bottomless martinis chez Elizabeth, the first of many wise women who will ferry Meg on her journey to feminist reawakening. Interspersed with Meg's first-person narrative are flashbacks in which various spirit guides in the past--her spinster Aunt Marcia; a sadistic nun; pre-title IX girl athletes, an adulterous neighbor--strive to warn Meg off her womanly destiny of self-abnegation. Meg ignores their message points (though the reader can't) and bucks the system only enough to become a sociology professor at the University of Chicago. Two great kids and a 25-year marriage later, Meg, pushing 50, fails to notice the signs of marital atrophy. How could she? Bob is so thinly portrayed that when he's not romping with geranium-toes in the master bedroom, he seems like a perfectly nice guy. Lucky for Meg, Aunt Marcia, long dead, left her a peachy setup in Mexico, complete with dancing dogs, happy peasants, a kindly ranchero and his hottie son. Oh, and a foundation benefiting women to lend some gravitas. All Meg has to do is get in a rusting Jeep driven by Harrison Ford's female twin and find that petal-strewn rock palace that's been created just for her. Imagine, but for her husband's twithood, she'd still be stewing in a vat of subdivision normalcy. Sure, no one beats Marilyn French and Marge Piercy at this genre, but at least Radish's stock characters know how to have a good time on their way to matriarchal Nirvana. Likely to appeal to the red hat crowd, but may annoy those with low tolerance for New Age blather. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Everything changes and the very foundation of her life comes into question when Meg witnesses her husband having sex with another woman on her bed in her suburban Chicago home. In order to find her way to a new life, Meg, along with three friends, re-creates the journey to Mexico that her favorite aunt took as a young woman. Her aunt's influence is still visible in remote Mexican villages, and the journey becomes spiritual as well as geographical. As Meg finds out more details of her aunt's life, she wonders why this wonderful woman's influence on her never took hold before she went into crisis. Then, when she returns to Chicago, Meg finds kindred spirits who have felt lost and oppressed but who now may be willing to let go and even dance naked. Once again Radish, author of The Elegant Gathering of White Snows (2003), sings the praises of sisterhood by creating an enticing world of women helping women to become the empowered individuals they were meant to be. --Patty Engelmann Copyright 2004 Booklist