Mary Guterson - "Gone to the Dogs" and "We Are All Fine Here"

Gone to the Dogs:

Welcome to my second book, wherein the heroine, Rena, steals her old boyfriend’s dog. Well, he dumped her, okay? And then he moved in with somebody else—somebody tall, athletic and blonde. And then he and that somebody else got themselves a dog. If I were Rena, I’d steal that dog, too. But I didn’t, because—despite rumors to the contrary—this book is not autobiographical, except maybe a little bit.

What happens next? Here are a few lines from the book’s jacket: “Unfortunately, being a dog-napper is the least of Rena's problems. Her mother’s dating a “potential” serial killer, her dope-smoking-turned-Orthodox-Jewish sister’s having an identity crisis, and she’s the target of one hopeless fix-up after another—most recently, the highly moral Chuck, who just happens to know all about Rena's dog-napping escapades.”

In other words, Rena’s got a mess on her hands.

As Randy Sue Coburn (author of Owl Island and A Better View of Paradise) says, “If Saul Bellow and Lucille Ball produced a love child, she would write like Mary Guterson.”

Purchase from Eagle Harbor Books Co.

From the book jacket of We Are All Fine Here:

A thoroughly irresistible debut novel about a discontented woman (married, with a teenage son, and fast approaching middle age) who dallies in her past-with startling, humorous, and bittersweet consequences. Julia has been married to Jim for fifteen years, but she has never really stopped thinking about the man who came before: Ray, the love of her life. Pushing forty, trapped in a job she doesn't care for, growing ever more distant from her son, and fed up with her husband's flirtation with a much younger coworker, Julia accompanies Ray to a wedding of friends and has a quick tryst in the bathroom. Several weeks later, she learns she's pregnant, and because she's also recently slept with Jim-a rare event of late-she can't be quite certain of the baby's paternity.

How Julia deals with this knotty problem (and with her prickly mother, her childless sister, her best friend, her husband's family, not to mention all the men in her life) is the core of this laugh-out-loud and wholly recognizable, unforgettable, and intelligent swift gulp of a novel-which also delivers unexpected heart.