Cozy Reader's Giveaway Extravaganza - Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakthrough

Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakthrough

(US/CAN - 2 Copies)

Author: Ruth Pennebaker
ISBN: 978-0425238561 Publisher: Berkley Trade


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About the Book:
Three generations, one house; zero sanity?


What happens when Mom, daughter, and Grandma are financially forced to share a roof.

AUSTIN, Texas – If there’s one lesson the Great Recession taught us, it’s how to host (and sometimes, be) unexpected roommates.

The number of multifamily households in the US is now at its highest since 1968, a demographic shift felt in each cramped bedroom and every crashed-on couch. It’s also the new American reality that gave rise to Ruth Pennebaker’s big-hearted, witty novel: Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakthrough (January 2011, Berkeley Trade Paperback Original / Penguin).

Pitting three women – mother, daughter, and grandmother – together under one roof, Pennebaker allows what she calls “a kind of horror story” to unfold:

Joanie is a recovering divorcee, has shakily re-entered the Austin, Texas, workplace, and has sworn off sex forever.

Ivy is her 78-year-old Christian mother, who hasrecently taken up shoplifting.

Caroline is Joanie's sulky teenager, whose pot brownies get distributed a little more widely than she expected.

And to top things off, Richard, Joanie's ex-husband, hasjust announced that his much younger girlfriend is pregnant.

Proving that mother-daughter relationships are more complex than any romance, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakthrough is a tough love story about individual isolation – the kind that happens with people you love, people with whom you share living quarters. In the end, it’s also a story is also aboutreaching a better understanding of one another, and learning to love a little better.

Praise for Women on the Verge of aNervous Breakthrough:
“There’s a rare honesty in [Ruth] Pennebaker’s work that allows for both empathy and ample schadenfreude as the women examine themselves and each other, and their inner lives have a winning warts-and-all air of authenticity.”
--Publishers Weekly Starred Review

“Pennebaker brings the realism of her young-adult novels to this debut adult novel, creating characters—both major and minor—who elicit sympathy and with whom readers can identify.” – Booklist

“It's a credit to the wry, sassy writing of longtime Austinite Ruth Pennebaker that Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakthrough, her first novel for adults, offers clear passage through the morass of Joanie's relationships and the big issues they represent. Aging, the economy and immigration are all seamlessly woven into a story that entertains first and educates second.”– Austin American-Statesman

About the Author:
RUTH PENNEBAKER is the acclaimed author of three young adult novels and one collection of essays. Her writings have appeared in The New York Times, The Dallas Morning News, Parents, Redbook, McCall’s, Cooking Light and other nationwide publications. She is currently a columnist for the Texas Observer, a commentator for KUT-FM,and host of the award-winning blog, The Fabulous GeezerSisters. She lives in Austin, Texas, with her husband and emotionally unstable cat, Lefty. For more information, please visit http://www.ruthpennebaker.com/.

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