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After losing her teaching position at the local university, Mariah Moon will do anything to keep her gifted twelve-year-old daughter, Lindsay, in a prestigious private school — which means moving in with her mother and grandmother in an apartment above The Owl and Moon Café.
When her mother, Allegra, is diagnosed with leukemia, Mariah rises to the challenge of running the café: mastering her mother's famous fudge and chatting up customers — including a man who might just reawaken her heart. Meanwhile, Lindsay's controversial entry in a major national science contest creates a minor maelstrom in the cosseted Monterey Bay community. And Allegra, with one last great love affair in her, will revisit a man she loved so many years ago, and disclose the biggest secret of the Moon family: the identity of Mariah's father.
Will the Moon women recognize this as the moment to do away with their family history of dubiously fathered children, and learn to forgive others and themselves in order to move forward? In her poignant new novel, bestselling author Jo-Ann Mapson explores the complexities of love and family with the keen eye and stylistic grace that have made her books perennial favorites.
Review:
"Mapson takes a break from her Bad Girl Creek series with this touching novel that chronicles the lives of four generations of women living under one roof. When sociology professor Mariah Moon loses her job, she and her Carl Sagan — loving genius 12-year-old daughter, Lindsay, move into the apartment shared by Mariah's hippie mom, Allegra, and staunchly Catholic grandmother, Bess. All four pitch in to run the family restaurant downstairs, where Mariah locks eyes with the charming Fergus Applecross, who's set to leave their California town of Pacific Grove and return to Scotland in a few months. Mariah takes a chance on him, to Allegra's delight and Lindsay's consternation. Allegra, meanwhile, is diagnosed with leukemia, but rediscovers the long-lost love of her life at the doctor's office. Lindsay, watching her grandmother struggle with both her illness and trying to cover the cost of medication, concocts a science project that involves growing marijuana (for medicinal applications, of course). Initially, the characters are pulled straight from central casting, but after a slow start, they become as complex and fascinating as the situations they find themselves in. (July 4)" Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)
Review:
"Chick lit is booming right now, but we mustn't forget that other, hardier, more long-lived genre: no-spring-chicken lit. Jo-Ann Mapson is an acknowledged expert at this form. She doesn't give a hoot about fierce girls who weigh 89 pounds and wear four-inch stilettos. Mapson's women are of the sadder-but-not-a-lot-wiser variety. She likes to put a flock of them in close quarters and then watch them... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) be headstrong, gullible (some would say stupid), openhearted, foolish for love, hardworking and wrongheaded. In 'The Owl & Moon Cafe,' Mapson introduces us to an all-woman, four-generation family. The elderly Gammy Bess lives in the charming California coastal town of Pacific Grove. She owns a place called the Owl & Moon Cafe, which serves delicious homemade pastries and is a center of social life in town. Still, the cafe is in financial trouble. There's no one to run it but Gammy, the mean old man who runs the dishwasher and Allegra, Gammy's only daughter, a long-in-the-tooth hippie who loves casual sex but hates drugs. Allegra had her only daughter, Mariah, at age 16. (Allegra was in love, of course, and her boyfriend went off to medical school without ever finding out about the pregnancy.) Warmhearted party doll Allegra is the heart and soul of the Owl & Moon. Mariah, cold-hearted and bitchy, worked long and hard to get out of the cafe business, choosing the academic life instead. 'She had her master's, and fully intended to finish her doctoral dissertation, as soon as a chunk of time came her way — coinciding with a blue moon, or a four-leaf clover, or a flying pig.' She's fired after teaching eight years of dead-end sociology classes and goes back to being a waitress at the good old Owl & Moon. The reason Mariah has failed in her endeavors? A dastardly cad who impregnated her and then flew the co-op, leaving her the mother of Lindsay, a 12-year-old genius who's in love with Carl Sagan. So there they all are at the Owl & Moon: Gammy, whose dialogue is limited to quaint talk like, 'That's fluffer-nutter and you know it'; Allegra, who comes down with leukemia on Page 18; Mariah, who shuns men like the plague but soon takes up with a fantastical Scotsman named Fergus Applecross, whose language also runs to the picturesque ('that holiday thing, yes, we must attend to that, ringing out the auld and welcoming the new, though I must confess, I've forgotten to purchase crackers and party hats, so sorry'); and poor Lindsay, who's stuck in a flossy private school where the girls are so mean that she develops an ulcer and begins vomiting blood. The author pushes her characters around with brutal disdain, high-handedly ignoring any demands of commonsense or 'reality.' Allegra, though a hippie, avoids those drugs purely for reasons of plot. When Lindsay needs a copy of a Sagan book, Fergus, for reasons of plot, drives all the way to Oregon to get it, when he could have ordered it from Amazon.com. ('I didn't dare take a chance on the post' is his lame excuse.) When Allegra finds out that her oncology doctor is actually the long-lost father of the forever cranky Mariah, why doesn't she mention that salient fact to (a) the father or (b) her daughter? Reasons of plot, of course. And, most distressingly, when Lindsay becomes more and more anxious and stops eating and loses all her friends, why doesn't one of these birdbrained women take her out of private school, or at least get her to a doctor, pronto? The answer, again: plot, plot, plot. Why does Mariah, in the heart of the finest pastry cafe on the Central Coast, choose to live on 'Pop-Tarts and Diet Coke'? Why do they all wait until Page 348 to hire a new waitress? And after all that 'woman solidarity' stuff, why does happiness finally come in the form of two eligible single men? (It can't be four men: Gammy's close to senile, and Lindsay has yet to hit puberty.) Are women really so fundamentally bone-dumb and frantic that they live their lives like this — like chickens with their heads cut off? No e-mails, please. I dread to know the answer." Reviewed by Carolyn See,who may be reached at www.carolynsee.com., Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
(hide most of this review)
Synopsis:
Four generations of women and their lives converge to deal with the difficult present and to return to the past to tackle unresolved issues of family, truth, and love.
Jo-Ann Mapson is the author of eight novels. She teaches fiction in the MFA program at the University of Alaska, and lives with her husband and four dogs in Anchorage, Alaska, where she is at work on a new
Product details
368 pages
Simon & Schuster -
English9780743266413
Reviews:
"Publishers Weekly Review"
by Publishers Weekly,
"Mapson takes a break from her Bad Girl Creek series with this touching novel that chronicles the lives of four generations of women living under one roof. When sociology professor Mariah Moon loses her job, she and her Carl Sagan — loving genius 12-year-old daughter, Lindsay, move into the apartment shared by Mariah's hippie mom, Allegra, and staunchly Catholic grandmother, Bess. All four pitch in to run the family restaurant downstairs, where Mariah locks eyes with the charming Fergus Applecross, who's set to leave their California town of Pacific Grove and return to Scotland in a few months. Mariah takes a chance on him, to Allegra's delight and Lindsay's consternation. Allegra, meanwhile, is diagnosed with leukemia, but rediscovers the long-lost love of her life at the doctor's office. Lindsay, watching her grandmother struggle with both her illness and trying to cover the cost of medication, concocts a science project that involves growing marijuana (for medicinal applications, of course). Initially, the characters are pulled straight from central casting, but after a slow start, they become as complex and fascinating as the situations they find themselves in. (July 4)" Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)
"Synopsis"
by Libri,
Four generations of women and their lives converge to deal with the difficult present and to return to the past to tackle unresolved issues of family, truth, and love.
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