Melissa Bank Libros

An epic, powerful and intensely personal debut about war, migration, family, and the search for a place to call home. For fans of PACHINKO, WILD SWANS and ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE

When Penguin published Melissa Bank's debut The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing in 1999, it was an immediate bestseller and was garlanded with praise by critics for its unique, honest and appealing voice. In this piece, Jane tells us about her relationship with a man who will never use her name.

Shannon is 30 and single. When her relationship falters, she moves home to save money. Once home, she is reluctantly drawn into the sometimes infuriating realm of her mother. Life for Shannon takes on the complexities of Flo's life, as mother and daughter struggle to redefine their own boundaries.

After following the advice from a manual called "How to Meet and Marry Mr Right", Jane learns that in love there is neither pattern nor promise. This is a funny collection of connected stories and a portrait of Jane, a woman manoeuvring her way through love, sex and relationships.

Meet Sophie Applebaum - as enchanting a heroine as Jane in The Girl's Guide to Hunting and Fishing. Sophie is an outsider and an inventor of rules, simply because she does not fit into any neat description of who she might be- she's Jewish, but lacks religious feeling; a book-lover but a mediocre student; a loyal friend often unpleasantly surprised and a less-than-devoted employee. She falls in love precipitously but isn't sure whom she should marry - or if she wants to marry at all despite all the family pressures and social clamour on this subject. We follow her to school, through college, to her first job with terrible typing skills, through to the realisation that work isn't fulfilment, that your parents aren't quite what you thought and that Mr. Right is sometimes only all right . . . Readers who loved The Girl's Guide to Hunting and Fishingwon't be disappointed; this is a sparkling, heartfelt, deeply explorative book characterized, as always, by Melissa Bank's light touch, signature humour, and her vast talent for capturing a moment.

Six years after her amazingly successful debut, <i>The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing</i>, Melissa Bank rewards her fans for their patience with <i>The Wonder Spot</i>, a refreshingly honest interpretation of one young woman's journey into adulthood. As we follow heroine Sophie Applebaum through a comfortable, yet awkward childhood in suburban Pennsylvania to the challenges of finding love and a career in midtown Manhattan, <i>The Wonder Spot</i> is never guilty of the self-indulgent traps set by other members of the Chick Lit genre Bank helped launch. We first meet the Applebaum clan on their way to cousin Rebecca's bat mitzvah in Chappaqua, New York, where Sophie ends up sneaking cigarettes in the woods with a handsome eighth grader one year her senior. Yet even this minor rebellion is more charming than anything else; as with most of her future transgressions, Sophie is less the instigator than the innocent witness. Defining moments in Sophie's life are revealed through her relationships: an almost mythical college roommate named Venice; her charismatic yet capricious older brother; her brilliant younger brother; her unpenetrable father; and her hilarious grandmother, who takes it upon herself to save her "Sophila" from "impending spinsterhood." Of course, no real journey into young womanhood is complete without a series of committment phobic, potentially delinquent, overly nice men whose appearances seem less about love than about demonstrating our heroine's inability to ever truly be comfortable with herself. As Sophie observes during a seventh grade skating party, "I felt sure that everyone was looking at me and then realized that no one was, and I experienced the distinct shame of each. Undeniably clever, occasionally hilarious, and often poignant, <i>The Wonder Spot</i> is captivating enough for readers to forgive Sophie's indecisive, self-destructive tendancies and simply bask in her sincerity. <i>--Gisele Toueg</i>