Claire
Cooke (Must
Love Dogs) has built a brand writing light-hearted women's fiction
where kernels of the absurd and comedic from everyday life blend to form
compulsively readable novels. In Time
Flies, she delivers again, this time by telling the story of Melanie, a
vulnerable, middle-aged, recently divorced, metal sculptor with a highway
driving phobia who is goaded by an old friend to attend their high school
reunion in Massachusetts.
Melanie, who had uprooted herself
and her then, two young sons to accommodate her husband's job years before, has
no desire to leave suburban Atlanta and revisit the past. She is content to
stay home and literally cut up her king-size marital bed with a chainsaw in
order to harvest the springs inside for a new artistic creation. "I'm not
famous, I didn't turn into a knockout, my husband left me," she tells her
relentless friend. But when an old high school flame, Finn Miller, emails to
ask if Melanie will be attending the reunion, their flirtatious correspondence,
and the fact that Melanie doesn't exactly remember him, is enough to pique her
interest and change her mind.
Hilarious potholes pave the way to
memory lane as Melanie journeys to Massachusetts, where she faces her fears
while reconnecting with old friends who are dealing with their own life
challenges. The piece de resistance, however, is the reunion itself where the
past and present riotously collide and give birth to an ending that is as
heartfelt as it is hopeful.
Time
Flies by Claire Cooke
Touchstone (Simon
& Schuster), $24.99, hardcover, 9781451673678 , 320 pp
Publication Date: June 11, 2013
To order this book via INDIEBOUND
link HERE
Note: This review is a reprint
and is being posted (in a slightly different form) with the permission of Shelf
Awareness. To read this review on Shelf
Awareness: Reader's Edition (6/14/13), click HERE
