From Publishers Weekly
A zinger of an opening scene, narrated with brio and poetic clarity, inaugurates the emotional tension and sweetly farcical action of this new novel by Anshaw (Aquamarine). Fern, 21, is a senior in college. More than a decade ago, her Chicago college administrator mother, Nora, left Fern's father to come out of the closet and live with her lover, Jeanne. A casualty of Nora's new identity, Fern is still sullen and vulnerable, and not about to make things easier for her mother, especially when she discovers that Nora is cheating on Jeanne, having succumbed to the passion ignited by tough-girl Pam, a construction worker. Fern also worries about her best friend, Tracy, a perennially restless and reckless adventurer who feels tied down by her new baby, born out of wedlock. Then Fern herself falls in love with a guy who has problems. Fortunately, Fern can confide in her Uncle Harold, a gentle cross-dresser who on Thursday afternoons hosts his canasta club as Dolores. The characters may be offbeat, but the novel is mainstream in its appeal, radiating energy and humor, and dispensing wisdom about the frailties of the human heart. Anshaw's prose sparkles with gems of description and solid psychological perceptions. The narrative smoothly integrates the flash points in mother-daughter relations, the bonds and tensions between lovers, the sexual fires that disrupt a trusting relationship, the ties that constitute family and the deep affection between a girl and her dog. The eponymous Lucky has been the one constant in Fern's life; his death is a touching rite of passage, when Fern understands that she has learned to take responsibility and feel compassion for herself and others. Agent, Jean Naggar. (May 22)Forecast: Movie scouts, take note. This could be a real winner on the silver screen. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Expertly crafted, with just the right amount of tension, drama, and humor, Anshaw's new novel is the kind of work that readers love to savor, anxiously reading ahead but regretting that it must come to an end. Nora and her teenage daughter, Fern, have a typically contentious relationship. They share a house with Nora's partner, Jeanne, and their dog, Lucky, and life is purring along until Nora makes a bad decision that results in a painful disruption of their family life. Fern, wise beyond her years, emerges as the real caregiver, checking in with her depressive boyfriend, rescuing her best friend from becoming a child abuser, and ultimately even putting her battles with her mother on hold long enough to help Nora recover her footing in life. Anshaw creates intelligent characters about whom the reader will come to care deeply. Her characterization of the aging family dog is as considered and detailed as that of the human principals in the story and will strike a familiar chord with pet owners. Anshaw is the author of two Lambda Award finalists, Aquamarine and Seven Moves. Her latest is highly recommended for all fiction collections. Caroline Mann, Univ. of Portland Lib., OR Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
The most reliable presence in Fern's topsy-turvy life is her dog, Lucky. Lucky stands by when Fern's parents split up; when Fern's mother, Nora, comes out; and when Nora and Jeanne move in together. Lucky is unfazed when Fern's promiscuous best friend, Tracy, becomes pregnant, has Vaughn, then leaves him with Fern. Fortunately, Fern also has the unconditional love of her sweet-souled, kitschy uncle Harold, a cross-dressing waiter/actor, because she needs all the support she can get. Anshaw presents a magnetic cast of complex characters and nimbly covers a great swathe of land-mined social terrain in this shrewd, sexy, and hilarious family-drama-cum-comedy-of-manners. Her endearing, make that heroic, twentysomething narrator juggles college classes, works as a 900-number psychic, and spars with her high-strung and lustful mother--who is about to jeopardize her peaceful existence ("People like to screw up a good thing," observes Harold)--and draws deeply on her spectacular capacity for love, expanding love's definition exponentially. Sharply observant, inventive, and witty, Anshaw, the author of Aquamarine (1992) and Seven Moves (1996), gets both her hometown, Chicago, and the mysterious realm of the heart just right in this delightfully smart, rollicking, hip, and poignant tale of family values writ large. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Book Description
Nora and Fern are just like any other mother and daughter - their relationship is tumultuous, marked by brooding silences and curt exchanges. For Nora, Fern is an enigma - incomprehensible, unfindable. Fern has never really forgiven her mother for leaving her marriage to live with her lover, Jeanne. Their story is a contemporary one, in which mothering is a mapless journey and children are left to form themselves in the shadows cast by idiosyncratic parenting. Here, too, is the reality that perfectly reasonable people will find some way to throw a wrench into the smooth, well-oiled workings of their lives. Nora"s relationship with Jeanne has settled into domestic stability, triggering in Nora a familiar restlessness that leads to an affair. When Fern intuits her mother"s indiscretion, she looks to the two people she depends on most: her uncle Harold and her best friend, Tracy, who now has the overwhelming task of raising a baby. As Fern begins to take on more of the baby's care herself, she discovers some of the powerful ambiguities of parental love - and starts to find her way back to her own mother. Carol Anshaw has been praised for her "warmhearted sympathies and lively wit" (Newsday). LUCKY IN THE CORNER, with the author's inimitable humor and insight, shows us the way a family reconfigures itself as unexpected changes come its way - and how, no matter what shape it takes, it remains a family.


About the Author
Carol Anshaw is the author of Aquamarine and Seven Moves, both Lambda Award finalists. She has won the Carl Sandburg Award, the Society of Midland Authors Award, and a creative writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. A recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Citation for Excellence in Reviewing, she reviews books for major newspapers nationwide.


Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
CrashNora is banked and blanketed in sleep. At ?rst, the mayhem outside is absorbed and accommodated by a dream she is having about the Good Humor truck that used to troll past her family"s house in the summers. She and her brother are running after it the way they used to in real life, jostled from afternoon naps, still in their underpants, ?sts full of change, yet in the time-pleat of the dream they are their adult selves, running in their underwear nonetheless. And then the nostalgic tenor of the dream shifts abruptly as the ice cream truck explodes. Nora"s eyelids ?ip open. Her partner, Jeanne, is already out of their bed, stumbling across the room to the window, which overlooks the street. "Something bad is happening," she says. Then, when she is at the window and has rubbed away the frost with the heel of her hand, she says, "What is this? No, this is very terrible." Nora pulls the comforter around her and listens to what is now absolute silence re?ecting off the ice-white night outside. And then it begins again — a lowercase armageddon, judgment rendered automotively. A car careens around the corner and hurtles down their block. Nora understands that this is its second pass; the ?rst was what awakened her. Then there is the gunning of an engine in neutral, the high whine of reverse, rubber tread crunching frantically through snow. The slam of steel on steel. A sucker punch of fender into door. The pull of metal snagged, then stretched, groaning. Slam and creak overlaid with shatter of glass. Then, a peeling-off into the wider night, leaving behind the tripped horn of a wounded car. Which, when Nora makes her way, reluctantly, to the window, she sees is her Jetta. It has been struck with such impact that it has left its parking space and now rests on the front lawn of the house across from theirs — home to a jumbled assortment of family with two burly father possibilities, both with furry hairdos and high trucks. A wife who stands on the porch through all but the harshest weather with cigarette and cordless phone. Several giant, sullen teenagers. These familiar strangers are now barely awake, bleary but curious, pulling on parkas, gathering up their forces as they lumber across the front yard, their way illuminated by blinking holiday lights. The storm door downstairs slams as Nora"s daughter, Fern, shouts behind her, "Hey! Come on!" More neighbors add themselves to the scene. A small group forms, bringing to bear on the situation the weight of ?esh and blood, and speculation. Nora turns to see Jeanne pull on pants and a sweater from a pile on the chair in the corner. She comes back to the window and puts a hand on Nora"s shoulder, a gesture to release her from whatever glitch is keeping her still when she should be leaping into action. Jeanne, of course, can"t know that within Nora is actually quite busy, gathering up all the false notes she is soon going to need to pretend she is surprised by what has just happened.NapFern and tracy stretch out on the wide, lumpy futon where they used to laugh, shaking like bowls of jelly through stoned sleepover nights as if there were no tomorrow, tomorrow being adulthood. They lie on their sides, facing each other, languid and silent, listening to the soft sweep of a sprinkler fanning Tracy"s mother"s garden, green aroma drifting up in the afternoon heat in the same lazy way a Cubs game from an unseen radio fades in and out on the soft waves of breeze. On the ?oor beside the bed, Lucky also lies on his side, legs stretched out straight. Fern had him clipped at the beginning of the summer, and now his fur has grown back some. He looks like a rusty lamb. At the moment, he appears to be pondering something, staring off into the middle distance dogs keep an eye on. Fern drops a hand, gives him a good scratch behind one ear. She ran over here with him an hour or so ago, although going on a run with Lucky, who"s deep into his golden years, means loping together for maybe thirty seconds, then sprinting on ahead for half a block, then doubling back and jogging in place while he ?nishes a two-minute sniff of an especially fascinating blade of grass. The girls are quiet because Tracy"s baby, Vaughn, is asleep between them, paci?er fallen from his mouth into a small puddle of drool on the ?annel bunched next to his face. Vaughn is four months old. Tracy puts the lightest pressure of a ?ngertip on the edge of his ear, which causes him to raise his arms and squiggle into a horizontal dance move, toes clenched. "He"s in a dream club," Fern says, noticing that Tracy"s swollen breasts are leaking milk through her old Smashing Pumpkins T-shirt. The Pumpkins are part of their past life when they were stuck in an edgy, static place. Now everything has changed. Vaughn is a sign, a sign that anything is possible. Tracy and Fern have been best friends since seventh grade, but Tracy won"t tell anyone — not even Fern — who Vaughn"s father is. "He was a bad idea I had for about one minute. Totally irrelevant" was what she said when she ?rst told Fern she was pregnant, and since then she hasn"t added anything to that small piece of non-information. Fern interpreted the statement to mean Tracy wasn"t all that sure herself who Vaughn"s father is. She was moving pretty fast at that point. Tracy"s boyfriends have all been bad news. For a while in high school, she was involved with a gang guy, Luis. He weighed about three hundred pounds but wasn"t fat, that kind of guy. For a whole summer, Tracy wore vinyl shorts and drove around with him in his low-rider while he dealt crystal meth, checked out graf?ti in alleys, and planned ?ghts. Over the course of that summer, she herself became moody and chemically overanimated. She traded make-up tips with huge-hair girls. Her own hair got huge, her lips got lined. Fern was sure she"d lost her, and then suddenly, in the fall, Luis was history and Tracy was back, her old self shakily reassembled. The next year, when they were juniors, Tracy disappeared for three weeks with someone named Don who ran the Tilt-A-Whirl in a traveling carnival that had set up in the parking lot of St. Ben"s. She lived in a trailer with him and his little dog through all the carnival"s stops in Indiana. Her parents freaked; Tracy was calling them from along the way, but not telling them where she was. The guy was forty-three. Tracy"s emotional life has been harrowing and exhausting for years. For a time, Fern envied it. She kept an eye on Tracy"s euphoria, Tracy"s sufferings, while she herself was only able to stand on the other side of heavy glass, reaching toward the smoking beakers of passion and derangement, her hands encased in heavy protective gloves, shielded from the chemical burn. Then Fern met Cooper and got some experience of her own. This has put them on more equal footing; now they both have stuff they don"t want to talk about. Vaughn is starting to come out of sleep. His lashes ?utter, his fat hands ball up into ?sts. Everything about him is so new — perfection awaiting the wear and tear of the life he"s about to live. She tells Tracy, "If you want to get out — you know, get a break — I could take him tomorrow." Fern enjoys hanging out with Vaughn, especially when it"s just the two of them, plus Lucky. A small, nonverbal community. "Thanks, but I"m on at the store." Tracy works part-time at a stupid store up on Clark called Aroma One"s Own. They sell scented candles and soaps, crystal jewelry, audiotapes of waves and dolphins, and what Tracy calls "spiritual clothing" — fanciful dresses and capes patterned with celestial motifs. "Thalia lets me bring the papoose to work. To show what a feminist and nurturing person she is. But the truth is he"s good for business. He"s a charmball, puts customers in a warm and fuzzy mood. Which can turn into a candle-purchasing mood." "Then what about coming over? Next week sometime? Friday. I"ll ?x dinner for everybody. Mom and Jeanne.My uncle. They"re all nuts for Vaughn. They"ll goo-goo, give you a break. Plus it"ll give me a chance to do my Stepford Daughter impersonation. Like — if I"m standing there cooking, I must be okay. They don"t have to start worrying about what"s really going on with me. It saves us all a lot of trouble." "We can invite your dad and Louise, too," Tracy says. This is a joke. Fern hates Louise. "She has a new gym," Fern tells Tracy. "Some gonzo ?tness place where they pinch you with calipers to check your percentage of body fat. She"s moved on to the stationary bike thing. Spinning. She"s a spinner." "What happened to the StairMaster?" Tracy says. "I thought Louise was Queen of the StairMaster." "They had to talk with her because she was hogging too many time periods. If you read history books, all the things Louise does were once ways they used to punish prisoners. Next she"ll ?nd a place where they put her in the hold of a ship and lash her to an oar." Suddenly Fern is tired of trashing Louise; she ?ips back to her dinner plan. "I"ll make my peasant spaghetti." Tracy sits and picks up Vaughn, who has started to fuss. She gives him a breast — her left, which in the old, pre-Vaughn days had a small gold ring through the nipple. Fern stretches half off the futon and reaches for a stack of CDs, ?ips through them to ?nd a Lucinda Williams disk, then plucks it from its case and sets it into Tracy"s boom box. Fern has only recently tuned in to Lucinda Williams. She has developed an ear for songs of murky obsession. They wait until the music starts. "Lucinda sings the way I feel," Fern says. "Like she"s learned so much from experiences with guys, but she"s also ready to do something stupid again in about ten minutes." "Yeah, Lucinda"s cool," Tracy says. She reaches down with her free hand and touches the side of Fern"s neck. "This, too," she says, meaning Fern"s tattoo. "Way, way cool." Fern herself already has serious doubts about the tattoo, which is a small black ankh. When she got it done a few months back, it seemed so ancient and mystical, so Egyptian and all. There was also the bonus that her mother would hate it, but there"s only so much she can get off on that. Lately Fern has been thinking there are probably too many people with tattoos, that they"re becoming cheesy personal statements along the lines of bumper stickers. She"s grateful for Tracy"s reassurance, though. This is one way in which Tracy is always a good friend. She can ?gure out exactly the thing Fern is having doubts about and boost her up. "Does it seem to you that things are moving pretty fast?" she asks Tracy. "It seems to me like they"ve stopped entirely." "But in terms of change around us. Vaughn, big change. My dad marrying Louise after all those years alone. Louise and her Bible-beating family and that hideous wedding with the minister telling them that Dad was the farmer and she was the mule pulling his plow or something like that. And — bam! — now these religious nuts are part of my family. Same with Jeanne. Before she came to live with us, she was just this Frenchy person my mother was sleeping with. But then all of a sudden she was, like, my assistant mother." "I envy you," Tracy says. "I still have my same nightmare parents. Worse, they still like each other; they"ll never get divorced. But you, you got a nice big divorce. Lots of drama." "Please." "Well, it"s true, and as it turned out, it"s cool. It got you Jeanne, who is way cooler than your father." "Yeah. Right," Fern says. Tracy ?at-out likes Jeanne and she"s probably right. Still, Fern likes to appear to be keeping her suspicions up, on principle, the principle being not to let her motherpush all the pieces around on her and totally get away with it. Actually, when it"s just the two of them together, Fern likes Jeanne ?ne. It"s only when she has to witness Jeanne"s devotion to Nora that Fern"s sentiments starts wavering between contempt for Jeanne for being such a fool and pity for Jeanne for being such a fool. Sooner or later, Fern knows Nora will betray Jeanne, the way she betrayed Fern and her father. She will become distracted and walk away toward whatever is distracting her, forgetting even to look back over her shoulder. Sometimes when she is with her mother and Jeanne, Fern gets a mild chill, as though a draft is passing through the room. Jeanne can"t feel this cold air, is incapable of imagining Nora"s treachery. That"s all right. Fern imagines for her. "And Louise," Tracy is on a roll. "Even Louise might not be all that bad. I mean, she gave you that check for your birthday." "It wasn"t a check. It was a dorky savings bond. I have to waituntil I"m retired or something to cash it in. When I"m ninety, I can stand all stooped over in line at the post of?ce and get ?fty dollars for it." She stops herself. "Oh man, do I sound like a total whiner, or what?" Vaughn lets go of his mother"s breast, appears totally satis?edfor a split second, then bunches up his face in distress. "Burp alert." Tracy hoists him over her shoulder and starts patting his back in time to the music. What"s actually bugging Fern is her own dead standstill in thisgreat ?utter of rearrangement. It seems she should be able to come up with some large, surprising event of her own. Instead, in place of actually being able to create a dramatic future for herself, she has become adept at making up one to suit the occasion or questioner. On the spot she can spin out to whomever — her mother or father or the head of the Anthro Department at school, or Turner, the therapist her parents had her seeing for a while — some detailed plan for the next few crucial years. She likes school but has no idea what she will do with all this education. She bluffs by putting together a full-color package featuring grants and fellowships and grad school programs and ?eld study semesters on this island or in that remote mountain village. Her line lately is that she wants to study the Nenets, an Arctictribe in Siberia, some of whom are reindeer herders adhering to a lifestyle so primitive they wear clothes made of reindeer skins and live in reindeer skin teepees, make nearly everything they need, and spurn all modern conveniences except ceramic teacups. They have the narrowest worldview imaginable. A Nenets proverb, for instance, is: "If you don"t eat warm blood and fresh meat, you are doomed to die on the tundra." The Nenets play into Fern"s fantasies of being in a much simpler situation, a place of limited expectations. She stretches off the mattress onto the ?oor to uncover the clock from beneath a pile of Tracy"s clothes, then gives Lucky a little massage on his chest. "Can you keep Lucky for the rest of the afternoon? I have to go to work. I"m on from four to eight tonight. Rush hour. Right after they run the infomercial." Vaughn curls up as though squeezing the sleep out of his body, pulling his legs and arms in, then pushing them out again. He smiles and explodes with something that sounds like "pow!" and becomes once again center of all the attention in the room. Even Lucky rallies. He gets up on his feet to stand quietly watching the baby for his next surprise. It occurs to Fern that Vaughn"s needs will be rapidly changing and expanding. Soon he"ll be tottering around, rummaging through danger-packed cabinets. Then he"ll have to be placed in preschool and go to summer oboe camp and get expensive braces on his teeth, and then in spite of all the attention and concern of the adults around him, he"ll do something brainless like inhale air freshener on a dare, or steal a car. Or ?unk out of a decent college and have to ?nish up at someplace nobody ever heard of in Ohio. But then he"ll get it all together and ?nd some niche in the universe. His own pattern of connect-the-dots. It"s hard to imagine; all of this seems remote as another galaxy on this still summer day that smells like lawn and tomatoes and seems as though it could hold itself in place forever. "What do you think he"s smiling about?" Tracy says, giving up her index ?nger to Vaughn"s grip. "What can a baby"s dreams be? What can he know yet?" "He knows he"s a miracle," Fern says, putting her face close to his head, which smells like powder and sweat and is covered in thick dark brown hair like a cheap toupee. Everyone says he"ll lose this, but so far he hasn"t. "He"s thinking, So far, so good. He"s resting on his laurels."Copyright © 2002 by Carol Anshaw. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company.

ANNOTATION

2002 Lambda Literary Award Finalist, Lesbian Fiction

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Nora and Fern are just like any other mother and daughter - their relationship is tumultuous, marked by brooding silences and curt exchanges. For Nora, Fern is an enigma - incomprehensible, unfindable. Fern has never really forgiven her mother for leaving her marriage to live with her lover, Jeanne. Their story is a contemporary one, in which mothering is a mapless journey and children are left to form themselves in the shadows cast by idiosyncratic parenting. Here, too, is the reality that perfectly reasonable people will find some way to throw a wrench into the smooth, well-oiled workings of their lives. Nora's relationship with Jeanne has settled into domestic stability, triggering in Nora a familiar restlessness that leads to an affair. When Fern intuits her mother's indiscretion, she looks to the two people she depends on most: her uncle Harold and her best friend, Tracy, who now has the overwhelming task of raising a baby. As Fern begins to take on more of the baby's care herself, she discovers some of the powerful ambiguities of parental love - and starts to find her way back to her own mother. Carol Anshaw has been praised for her "warmhearted sympathies and lively wit" (Newsday). LUCKY IN THE CORNER, with the author's inimitable humor and insight, shows us the way a family reconfigures itself as unexpected changes come its way - and how, no matter what shape it takes, it remains a family.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

A zinger of an opening scene, narrated with brio and poetic clarity, inaugurates the emotional tension and sweetly farcical action of this new novel by Anshaw (Aquamarine). Fern, 21, is a senior in college. More than a decade ago, her Chicago college administrator mother, Nora, left Fern's father to come out of the closet and live with her lover, Jeanne. A casualty of Nora's new identity, Fern is still sullen and vulnerable, and not about to make things easier for her mother, especially when she discovers that Nora is cheating on Jeanne, having succumbed to the passion ignited by tough-girl Pam, a construction worker. Fern also worries about her best friend, Tracy, a perennially restless and reckless adventurer who feels tied down by her new baby, born out of wedlock. Then Fern herself falls in love with a guy who has problems. Fortunately, Fern can confide in her Uncle Harold, a gentle cross-dresser who on Thursday afternoons hosts his canasta club as Dolores. The characters may be offbeat, but the novel is mainstream in its appeal, radiating energy and humor, and dispensing wisdom about the frailties of the human heart. Anshaw's prose sparkles with gems of description and solid psychological perceptions. The narrative smoothly integrates the flash points in mother-daughter relations, the bonds and tensions between lovers, the sexual fires that disrupt a trusting relationship, the ties that constitute family and the deep affection between a girl and her dog. The eponymous Lucky has been the one constant in Fern's life; his death is a touching rite of passage, when Fern understands that she has learned to take responsibility and feel compassion for herself and others. Agent, Jean Naggar. (May 22) Forecast: Movie scouts, take note. This could be a real winner on the silver screen. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Expertly crafted, with just the right amount of tension, drama, and humor, Anshaw's new novel is the kind of work that readers love to savor, anxiously reading ahead but regretting that it must come to an end. Nora and her teenage daughter, Fern, have a typically contentious relationship. They share a house with Nora's partner, Jeanne, and their dog, Lucky, and life is purring along until Nora makes a bad decision that results in a painful disruption of their family life. Fern, wise beyond her years, emerges as the real caregiver, checking in with her depressive boyfriend, rescuing her best friend from becoming a child abuser, and ultimately even putting her battles with her mother on hold long enough to help Nora recover her footing in life. Anshaw creates intelligent characters about whom the reader will come to care deeply. Her characterization of the aging family dog is as considered and detailed as that of the human principals in the story and will strike a familiar chord with pet owners. Anshaw is the author of two Lambda Award finalists, Aquamarine and Seven Moves. Her latest is highly recommended for all fiction collections. Caroline Mann, Univ. of Portland Lib., OR Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews