"Something Dastic" Colleen Curran

Ahhh, the New Year! I always love this time of year, the week between Christmas and New Year's. I usually take the time to clean the house and sort through my "junk" to make way for everything that the new year may bring. It seems like this process has taken longer than usual for me this year, as I've been cleaning and sorting through junk since the fall when we got a new water softener and had to give up our "junk corner". Just last week I got Jay to bring a pile of stuff to the dump, and I'm still working on giving away old baby toys and clothes, as well as books that I haven't read in the past year. In a way it's nice, although it is a lot of work, "cleansing" the house of all things that just clutter it up.

Aside from that, I'm also catching up on reading through the pile of books that have been accumulating on my bookshelf in the past couple of months when things started getting busy for the holidays. I've read the last book that I'll be reading for the Fabulous Fall Reading Challenge: Wally Lamb's "The Hour I First Believed" was my last entry into the contest- and what a last entry! It was by far one of the best books I've read all year. Out of the list of 12 possible challenge titles I managed to read 7, and athough I would have liked to have gotten more read, that was all that I could fit in.

One of the books that was sitting on my shelf waiting to be read was Colleen Curran's "Something Drastic". After I finished "The Hour I First Believed" I needed a lighter read (I find myself unable to go right from one thought-provoking book directly to another; I find that I need time to process the first one before I can read another one) and this book fit the bill.

When we first meet Lenore it is January 6th, and her live-in boyfriend of 8 years has just left her on Boxing Day. She writes letters to him at the post office box address that he left her so that she could forward on his mail, and she does not understand why he has left her. Things were good between the two of them, or so she thought, and when she gets home from the Boxing Day sales she simply finds that he is gone. He's left her a note; he's not happy with the "Status Quo" and has moved to Florida to work for the tourist industry. Lenore finds out in February that he did manage to steal over $3,000 from her, as he was kind enough to make charges to her credit card and run up her phone bill before he left.

Over the next 12 months, Lenore wakes up to the kind of person that Fergie truly was. She finds out that he was a pot-smoking, car-stealing leech, selfish to the worst degree. As she works through her confusion and heartbreak, a whole new Lenore emerges, finally free from being her boyfriend's timid shadow. Lenore finds out that she can sing, and that she can sing well; she makes new friends, get to know her neighbor and baby-sits her dogs, and plays a big part in a local musical. "Something Drastic" is utterly charming, the characters lovable, and the theme a good one: never lose who you are for a man. A "feel-good" novel, this one will have a place on my shelves, ready for when I need something comforting to read.

You can find out more about "Something Drastic" here, and you can find out more about the publisher, Goose Lane Editions, here. Thank-you to Lex at Mini Book Expo for the copy!