Grandma's Teacup Book

What I love about this book is (to use an Austen catchphrase) the author's sensibility, comic and divine. The same subject--an older woman abandoned and badly treated by her husband of half a century, left to make do with her middle aged and maladjusted daughters--could have been treated as a tragedy. But Schine sees the frailty and self-deceptions in all of her characters, and she manages to smile upon them nonetheless, or because of their all too human (and all too familiar) weaknesses. She's wickedly perceptive, too. One of the very middle aged daughters, spotting a handsome younger man, reflects, "It was difficult to imagine a young man being so very much younger when you could never quite see yourself as old." I'm already there, I'm afraid. On the same page, when she spots the exact man she wants to see, Schine deals with the unlikely coincidence with this brilliant and hilarious explanation: "Somehow, she knew he would be there. She couldn't have told you how, and like so many premonitions, this one could so easily have not been true, in which case she would have forgotten that she ever had a premonition. But she did have one, and it was sure and accurate: she was a sybil, a prophetess, a seer..." Gently mocking lines like these made the endless comparisons to Austen apt, and had me cackling with glee. I only shaved off one star because I found the book a little slow as a whole, in spite of the pleasures to be had page by page. I particularly like how she delves into the minds of all of the characters. Everyone gets the same treatment of partial illumination (they think they know themselves better than they do) and loving mockery.