All the wrong moves
The Love of Women by Denise Neuhaus Faber $119 FROM page one, you know this is the tale of a woman you're going to adore or despise. She's educated, stylish and comes home every night thinking: ''What I need is a drink.'' Apart from its quirky heroine, equally at ease sleeping with men or women but with many of her ideas straight from the ark, this is an interesting book offering a twist on the good, old rites of passage novel.
Kristina resigns from an executive corporate job when she realises she is going to be fired and goes home to mother in Houston. She has done this before when her marriage broke up: now she is going home without a man, job or money and only the vaguest hopes for the future.
Suburban Houston, steamily hot, downbeat, tacky and poor, is a world away from New York, yet the people in it are just as complicated and Kristina cannot simply pass through to slough off a phase in her life.
Her dumpy, efficient, peevish mother finds Kristina's visit an imposition and finally finds the honesty to tell her so. And her slovenly, drug-addicted sister is scrabbling to get life together without the benefits of brains, husband or wealth.
Then there are the group of women, to whom she so consciously attaches the label ''friends''. Kristina believes she has never had any real friends and is eager to embrace the odd but likeable clutch of women attached to the local college where she finds a job teaching French.
In this group, Kristina meets the unsophisticated Lynette and a relationship ensues. At heart, this is not a happy love story but the telling of it is frank and upbeat and by the end, Kristina, while still in Houston, has moved on in terms of her personal development. A good-humoured look at relationships, despite the worthy American moralising towards the end.
