β Scribed by Notaro, Laurie
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
The first novel from the New York Times bestselling author of The Idiot Girlsβ Action-Adventure Club is a rollicking tale of small-town peculiarity, dark secrets, and one extraordinary beauty pageant.
When her husband is offered a post at a small university, Maye is only too happy to pack up and leave the relentless Phoenix heat for the lush green quietude of Spaulding, Washington. While she loves the odd little town, there is one thing she didnβt anticipate: just how heartbreaking it would be leaving her friends behind. And when youβre a childless thirtysomething freelance writer who works at home, making new friends can be quite a challenge.
After a series of false starts nearly gets her exiled from town, Maye decides that her last chance to connect with her new neighbors is to enter the annual Sewer Pipe Queen Pageant, a kooky but dead-serious local tradition open to contestants of all ages and genders. Aided by a deranged former pageant queen with one eyebrow, Maye doesnβt just make a splash, she uncovers a sinister mystery that has haunted the town for decades.
β[Laurie Notaro] may be the funniest writer in this solar system.β
βThe Miami Herald
Humorist Notaro (The Idiot Girls' Action-Adventure Club , etc.) transitions to fiction with a comic mix of wife lit and smalltown suspense. When Maye Roberts's husband, Charlie, gets a tenure-track job at prestigious Spaulding University, childless, 30-something Maye leaves her tight-knit group of friends and job as a Phoenix reporter to move to the school's eponymous Washington State burg. While Charlie fits in easily, Maye, after a faculty dinner run-in with Dean Spaulding's wife, Rowena, feels lonely and bored. When she learns about the Sewer Pipe Queen pageant, a local tradition that guarantees the winner a town full of friends, she enters with her singing dog, inflaming Rowena further. As tensions thicken, Maye's rather notorious pageant sponsor, Ruby, may hold the key to Rowena's continuing rage and to the decades-old incident that sparked it. Though some of the plot falls flat, Notaro makes Maye's perspective strong enough to hold the story together, and the book is filled with the same winningly acerbic riffs that drive Notaro's popular essays. (June)
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Fans of humorist Notaro will certainly want to pick up her first try at fiction. Readers unfamiliar with her earlier essay collections, e.g., Idiot Girls' Action-Adventure Club and Autobiography of a Fat Bride, should prepare to laugh loudly and often at her irreverent observations and depictions of life's embarrassing moments. Phoenix reporter-turned-freelance writer Maye relocates with her professor husband to an eccentric college town in the Pacific Northwest. But she has a hard time fitting into the close-knit community and an even harder time making friends. Enter the Sewer Pipe Queen Pageant, a piano-playing Australian shepherd, and a chain-smoking pageant coach, who memorably gives the following advice: "You're fighting a battle of good and evil with your dog pimp! Your only weapon is the shimmy! There is power in the shimmy! Make him fear your shimmy!" Recommended for public libraries and academic libraries with large fiction collections. --Amy Watts, Univ. of Georgia Lib., Athens -- Library Journal April 1, 2007
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### From Publishers Weekly Humorist Notaro (_The Idiot Girls' Action-Adventure Club_, etc.) transitions to fiction with a comic mix of wife lit and smalltown suspense. When Maye Roberts's husband, Charlie, gets a tenure-track job at prestigious Spaulding University, childless, 30-something Maye lea