SILVER SCREAM (Mary Daheim)

Seattle bed & breakfast owner Judith Flynn has agreed to accomodate famous Hollywood producer Bruno Zepf and the cast and crew of his latest movie, which will premiere in Seattle on Halloween.  Zepf believes that it is good luck to stay in a B&B the night before a premiere, but several of the Hollywood elite who accompany him disagree.  Unfortunately, Zepf ends up face down in Judith's half-full kitchen sink, the victim of very bad luck indeed.  Judith enlists her cousin Renie to help investigate Bruno's death, hoping to avert a lawsuit or negative repercussions for her business. 

This is the 18th in Daheim's Bed & Breakfast series, but it is the first that I have read.  Judith's mother, Gertrude, who lives in a converted garage and suffers from slight dementia, adds a particularly humorous element to this series, which sort of goes beyond "coziness."  I enjoyed the relationship between Judith and Renie and the eccentricities of the various friends and family members that surround them.  I wonder how many of the murders in this series have actually happened at Judith's Hillside Manor?  Now THAT might have an adverse effect on reservations!  Check out this series if you are looking for something a little bit different.

THE UNCOUPLING (Meg Wolitzer)

In Aristophanes' play, Lysistrata, the women of Greece refuse to engage in relations with their husbands and boyfriends until they agree to end the Peloponnesian War.  As New Jersey drama teacher Fran Heller announces her decision to present Lysistrata as the annual play at Eleanor Roosevelt High School, a spell slowly weaves its way through the homes of students and teachers alike until all of the women of Stellar Plains lose interest in sex.  Even popular English teachers Rob and Dory Lang, who have enjoyed what they consider to be a robust sex life throughout their marriage, suddenly find themselves at odds over intimacy.  Boyfriends are frustrated by their girlfriends sudden lack of interest and even beautiful school psychologist Leanne Bannerjee, who prefers to play the field, finds herself breaking off with all of her boyfriends.

I am a fan of Wolitzer and I enjoyed The Ten Year Nap immensely, but I found The Uncoupling to be a little bit unsatisfying.  I would have liked to see Wolitzer's characters explore the non-sexual aspects of their relationships more instead of settling in to what seemed like resigned, sterile versions of their previous lives.  The characters were interesting, especially Fran Heller, the drama teacher, whose husband, through some mutually satisfactory agreement, lives in the midwest while Fran travels from one teacxhing job to another, always presenting Lysistrata with her students.  I'm not a lover of "spells" and when I finished the novel I didn't feel that I had a good understanding of the "why" of the story.  I would not NOT recommend it, but I noticed that there are some completely opposing reviews out there, so I am not the only one who is confused or conflicted over this book.

THE WEIRD SISTERS (Eleanor Brown)

The Weird Sisters are Rosalind, Bianca, and Cordelia Andreas, ages 33, 30, and 27 respectively. All of them have returned home, purportedly to help their parents cope with their mother's breast cancer treatments.  In reality, Rose suffers from inertia, finding herself so attached to hearth, home, and family that she is unable to leave Barnwell, the college town where she grew up, to follow her much-loved fiance to England when he is offered a temporary position at Oxford.  Bianca (aka Bean), unbeknownst to her family, returns home in disgrace, having been fired from her job after the payroll "adjustments" she made in order to afford her increasingly demanding lifestyle are discovered.  Cordy, after years of wandering the country and in and out of the beds of almost any man  she fancies, finds herself pregnant and uninterested in finding the baby's father, an itinerant artist with whom she shared a meaningless fling.  The three sisters, daughters of a Shakespeare-quoting college professor (too funny, even if you are not a fan of the bard), are named for Shakespearean characters and grew up reading constantly, deprived of television and other normal childhood.  Even now, books are scattered throughout the house and the family seems to just pick them up at random and continue reading wherever the last reader left off.

Brown focuses on the Andreas' skewed family dynamics in this, her debut novel, and it's all about the sisters.  Rose is a martyr, the family organizer, the practical one.  Bean is the needy attention-grabber, the pretty, ambitious one whose need to maintain her standard of living engulfs everything else in her live.  Cordy is the free spirit, the baby of the family who never quite needed to grow up until now.  Individually, they are interesting, but together they are hilarious with a touch of desperation.  Anyone with sisters will appreciate this novel, and anyone who has ever had to return to their childhood home for comfort and a safe haven will sympathize with the Weird Sisters.  The title, by the way, harkens back to the three witches in Macbeth.