Eat, Read, and Be Mommy

This morning–the first official morning of summer vacation–my 16-year-old had to be at the high school at 6 AM for Dance Company’s ‘beginning of summer hike’. And because she doesn’t like to be late (among–ahem!–other reasons), I’ve been up since 5:30. (In case you’re wondering, the high school is a max of 15 minutes away.) On the other hand, since I was definitively too awake to go back to sleep when I got home after dropping her off, I had a quiet hour (plus) to myself in which to work on my puzzle and finish listening to Katherine Center’s The Bright Side of Disaster, one of her earliest novels. (It was first published the year my oldest was born, which tracks with the use of 411 and the phone book.) And while I love Katherine Center–she’s funny, she brings the feels, and her characters are beautifully relatable–I have to confess that this one drove me a little crazy.

First, the premise–we have very pregnant Jenny, whose live-in almost husband is clearly a loser; when he takes off at around the 25% point, my only complaint was that he hung around that long. She (of course) goes into labor the next day, and a decent chunk of the novel is taken up with the all-encompassing life change that is first-time motherhood–the sleep deprivation, the rocky road to breast-feeding successfully, and sheer terror of OH NO I’M RESPONSIBLE FOR THIS BABY. Jenny’s parenting choices don’t always make her life easier, but then, who knows what I would have done in her place; I had a husband who loved (loves) kids with me from day 1. (And don’t get me wrong, she’s a careful and loving mother–she’s just more willing to leap to attention and be a bit of a human pacifier than I was.) Eventually, through the haze, she starts having more frequent run-ins with her nice guy neighbor, and (after many conversations, not to mention dinners together while he’s painting her garage), they finally have a fantastic first date just before the loser shows up again. How she deals with him for the next hour of the audiobook is what REALLY drove me crazy, because there were some definite bad choices there. (TALK, Jenny. He claimed to actually want to talk when he first came back, and if you’d talked then, you might have spared all of us the majority of the loser reprise.) Ultimately, of course, she comes to her senses, but by then, is her chance with her neighbor gone forever?

I mean, of course not, but still. How that works out is pretty good, but not as satisfying as in her subsequent books. (Her subsequent books also have fewer f-bombs, which I appreciate.) There’s some unevenness with Jenny’s female friends in this one as well, so that while Bright Side is definitely not a waste of your time, I wouldn’t necessarily rush to put it at the top of your reading list.

In the meantime, my nephew who’s just home from his mission spoke in church on Sunday, and my oldest got set apart as a missionary, so she’s official! I hope all your weekends were lovely…