Looking for a Love Story
Louise Shaffer
Ballantine, Apr 6 2010, $15.00
ISBN: 9780345502100
In Manhattan Francesca's first novel Love requires that she take a photograph by highly regarded photographer Jake Morris. They are in immediate lust followed almost immediately with a tryst in his nearby apartment. Before he returns to work he suggests they meet to marry.
Several years later, Jake divorced Francesca and has since remarried and moved to California. Adrift Francesca got their dog Annie and loneliness. Francesca meets octogenarian Chicky, who asks her to write the real love story, a biography of her Vaudeville parents Joe and Ellie. Needing to feed her and Annie, she accepts the writing memoir although she wishes her client would stop calling her Baby Doll. However, as she learns of the unlikely love story of Joe and Ellie friends for life, Francesca introspectively reflects on her own life, that of her parents and of her relationship with Jake. Her musing has her begin to move on as she struggles to find a publisher for the love story memoir she wrote.
Looking for a Love Story is an entertaining whimsical chick lit tale starring a delightfully flawed lead protagonist. Francesca is terrific as she learns so much about what makes a relationship work with the realization her best friend is Annie. The support cast enhances the complexities of the modern world as relationships are not linear but a series of interconnecting waves. Readers who enjoy a thought-provoking character study will appreciate Francesca seeking her groove, as she begins to understand thanks to Joe and Ellie the key ingredient that any relational groove requires.
Harriet Klausner
No comments:
Post a Comment