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Advanced praise for Gone to the Dogs:
"Hilarious, touching, and downright inspiring, Gone to the Dogs is unrestrained good fun and an irresistible read!"
--Garth Stein, author of The Art of Racing in the Rain
"Fans of Jennifer Weiner will eat this up like good dark chocolate."
--Debra Dean, author of The Madonnas of Leningrad
"The sharp wit and keen observations of Gone to the Dogs had me compulsively turning pages. If Saul Bellow and Lucille Ball produced a love child, she would write like Mary Guterson."
--Randy Sue Coburn, author of Owl Island
Praise for We Are All Fine Here: "So, I figured, what the hell." That's Julia's response to just about anything, including marriage, pregnancy and cheating on her husband-not necessarily in that order. In this wry, brutally honest debut novel, Guterson slashes into the happy homilies of chick lit, revealing the underside of happily ever after. Part-time middle-school teacher Julia is nearing 40 and married to more-or-less satisfactory Jim, a Seattle sports writer, with whom she has a 15-year-old son, Chad. For years, she's been pining away for her first love, Ray, and when she sees him at a wedding-"looking for all the world like a sun-drenched god"-she promptly follows him into the bathroom. Soon she's pregnant, and she can't be sure whether the father is Jim or Ray. Meanwhile, clueless Jim is distracted by a painfully obvious crush on his young, beautiful officemate Patricia, which prevents him from taking the moral high ground. What distinguishes this book from its genre counterparts is author Guterson's unabashed willingness to let Julia voice the sort of thoughts that are publicly eschewed, and these glimpses into the mind of her tell-it-like-it-is narrator make for some liberating, laugh-out- loud passages. There are also moments of heartbreak and kindness-particularly in Julia's relationship with Chad-which are all the more potent for their understatement.
--Publishers Weekly
This first novel offers a funny yet heartfelt answer to the question, What happened to the one that got away? ...With Julia as the first-person narrator, readers can hear her innermost thoughts, and the comedy inherent in the situation comes through.
--Library Journal
Serves up heft doses of acerbic wit...
"The perfect novel."
--Mark Salzman
Acerbic, blunt and interior... all the more poignant because it's played close to the chest.
This impossible-to-put-down novel is a gripping, emotional roller coaster...
As wonderfully solid as a novel about fleeting moments can be. It has a heroine you can sympathize with, a situation full of sex, goofiness and pathos, and vividly spare writing that reads like real life.
--Seattle Times
“A real winner. What a voice: laugh-aloud hilarious, full of naked truth.”
“I love books that make me laugh. I love books that move me. Most of all, I love books that do both. Like this one. Mary Guterson is witty, wily, and wonderful.”
“A gracefully imagined and bluntly expressed novel, a rare combination. It speaks directly to the heart about the heart, also rare and very welcome.”
“A brisk and irreverent romp through the panic fields of contemporary marriage. Mary Guterson is wickedly, bruisingly funny. Her characters may be uncertain about, well, almost everything, but there’s nothing they’re afraid to tell us.”
I loved, loved, loved this first novel. Mary Guterson's wry sense of humor and incredible insight make it impossible to do anything but forget everything else and just read this story of rekindled love all at once. What fun!
--Booksense.com
A short and funny read....explores the theme of whether "the grass is always greener." In so doing, Guterson invites us to recognize how everyday failure forms the backbone of life, as surely as success and moral fortitude do.
--San Francisco Chronicle
Delightfully smart and heartfelt—and exceptionally funny. [A] thoroughly irresistible debut from a new and instantly engaging voice. [An] intelligent and refreshingly honest novel.
--Open Door Books
Guterson understands, and will cause her readers to understand, that there are no free lunches where love is concerned. We Are All Fine Here is never judgmental, always irreverent, a sardonic, gimlet-eyed look at life at its messiest, the way most of us live it whether we mean to or not.
Although bound to happen, it will be a great disservice if Mary Guterson's
debut novel, We Are All Fine Here (Putnam, $18.95), is labeled chick lit.
The book is so much more.
--Publishers Weekly Daily
This slim, wryly witty first novel by Mary Guterson will strike a chord with anyone who has fantasized about rekindling a lost love or revisiting the past to find out what might have been... Mary Guterson's quirky, irreverent debut proves to be an honest portrait of the vicissitudes of modern marriage and the seeds of discontent that can be its undoing.
--BookPage
Julia, the protagonist of Mary Guterson’s debut novel, We Are All Fine Here, is one of the most refreshing and honest female voices to come along in recent memory. [This book] will have you laughing and cheering right to the very end.
--Amy Cox Williams, Advance Magazine
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