Summer gloves

Sarah Gilbert, one of the sharpest, funniest, most original new voices in southern literature, moves beyond the zany worlds of her previous novels Hairdo and Dixie Riggs to venture into a far more dangerous geography: the perfect location for grandiose plots and insidious betrayals, obsessive love and intemperate acts...the modern American family. Now she explores that most loaded of all relationships, the one between mothers and daughters, and shows us that here indeed is a bond made with Krazy Glue. In some lives there comes one fateful day when things completely fall apart. For Pammy Outlaw, once fourth runner-up in the Miss America contest, it is laundry day, plain old ordinary laundry day, that leads to the worst discovery a woman married fifteen years can face - a hotel receipt for Mr. & Mrs. in her husband's pants pocket when the Mrs. wasn't her. Pammy has been so busy escorting her 13-year-old daughter on the beauty circuit, just as her mother, the former Miss New Jersey, had done with her, that she misses all the signs of a marriage in trouble. Actually, she has seen the handwriting on the wall, she just Formula 409-ed it off as quickly as possible. Pammy has tried to be the perfect wife, supporting her husband's decision to return to college, tolerating his disdain of her taste for romances ("Frankly, unlike Flick, I prefer the books where in the end the woman gets the man and he screws her eyes out and they live happily ever after"), and only drawing the line at infidelity. What are her options? Fight to get her husband back? Go home to her mother in New Jersey? Find a new man to fill her empty nights? Try to keep her junior beauty queen daughter from suspecting her mommy and daddy have split for good? Pammy chooses all of the above, and the result is a moving, funny, and deeply felt look at a grandmother who wears white gloves in the summer, a daughter who enters puberty with a vengeance, and a feisty, thirty-something woman with a breaking heart, forced to discover who she really wants to be. As sexy and outrageous as Sarah Gilbert's high-spirited previous works, but twice as wise, Summer Gloves will knock your socks off with its plain-talking, honest portrayal of a woman's true needs. It may even tempt you to slip on some summer gloves...just for size.