Carousel of Progress

Meet Meredith Herman

Meet Meredith Herman, a fourteen-year-old expert witness to the slow unraveling of her parents'' marriage amid the lunacy of Los Angeles, 1978, a world of bell-bottoms, grapefruit diets, and plastic surgery. Meredith is a girl of a specific time and place tackling the universal challenges of boys, school, and parents. Her mother, Leigh, is a housewife suffering an excruciating and often hilarious midlife discontent, a malaise that leaves Meredith''s father, Robert, genuinely baffled. As Leigh attempts to reinvent herself as a liberated lady - complete with assertiveness-training classes and a dalliance with an exotic artist - Robert runs for cover into a hasty second marriage. Through it all, Meredith and Leigh struggle in a combative mother-daughter relationship as wonderfully real as any in contemporary fiction.

Tanney''s debut sparkles with pitch-perfect dialogue and an astonishingly accurate sense of place. This novel will take readers on a journey of belly laughs and heartbreak. The Herman family''s story will charm and captivate you long after you''ve turned the last page.

From the Hardcover edition.