DownloadThe Portobello Bookshop Gift Guide 2024

Reconsidering Happiness

A Novel

Sherrie Flick author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:University of Nebraska Press

Published:1st Sep '09

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

Reconsidering Happiness cover

Novel about two restless women and their search for happiness

In a story of lust and longing, love and loneliness, disappointment and desire stretching from the East Coast to the West, two pioneering women navigate through secrets, lies, decisions, and compromises shared over pool tables, postcards, and shots of whiskey.The two silent Ss of Des Moines beckon twenty-three-year-old Vivette with a sexy finger, a promise. So, in the mid-1990s, she convinces Grandpa Joe-Joe to sell his Buick for twenty dollars, leaves behind her friends, her job at a hip New England bakery, and an affair with a married man, and moves to Iowa. Margaret, who left the same bakery years earlier on her own restless quest, offers pointers from her cautiously settled Nebraska life. In a story of lust and longing, love and loneliness, disappointment and desire stretching from the East Coast to the West, these two pioneering women navigate through secrets, lies, decisions, and compromises shared over pool tables, postcards, and shots of whiskey. Starting up, starting over, slowing down, they crisscross each other’s lives like highways on a map, always escaping, flying toward a dreamt future, and trying to avoid the charted course.

"In her descriptions of food, the Nebraskan landscape, and the rhythms of work at a tourist town bakery, Flick indulges in sensual detail with pleasurable results."—Publishers Weekly
"Alternating between time and perspectives, and spanning the two coasts, this introspective, conversational, travelogue-like novel captures the pensive force driving the two women's personal journeys, and how the women are illuminated by sparks of reconciliation along the way."—Leah Strauss, Booklist
"Inviting, warm, rich and complex."—Sherri Hallgren, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
"Flick's narrative descriptions of Nebraska are dazzling, as are her portrayals of food and working in a bakery. . . . Reconsidering Happiness is a thoughtful work for thoughtful readers, who enjoy fine literature."—Christopher Zoukis, kansascity.com

ISBN: 9780803225213

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: 272g

220 pages