2010 Book 21 - Murderous Urges of Ordinary Women - A Novel

I just picked up and inhaled this book. Murderous Urges of Ordinary Women - A Novel by Lois Meltzer is fantastic!! First, the back cover:

Meet: Best friends Sandi, Janet, Ellie, and Carole - four ordinary women confronting the ordinary angst of being middle-aged and female.

"All of a sudden," Ellie says, "it's as if we've become invisible."
It makes them angry.
And that isn't all that makes them angry.
More and more the routine irritations of modern life - the tailgating trucker, the parking-spot thief - seem to fill them with this fierce, impotent rage.
Then one day, at a trendy seafood restaurant, Sandi tosses an obnoxious jerk's cellphone in the lobster tank, and nobody notices. Invisibility, the friends realize, may have its uses: A middle-aged woman might be able to get away with anything, absolutely anything....
Soon they take up Vengeance as their mid-life hobby, the way other women might take up the auto harp or learn Portuguese...

Meet: The Book Group from Hell.....

I picked up this book partially because of the title and partially because of the cover (I'm a sucker for the cover of a book). The cover has a bastardized picture of Grant Wood's painting American Gothic. This is one of my mother's favorite artists and paintings and I am therefore very susceptible to the image and the many forms that it has taken over the years.

However, once I got past the title and the cover art and started reading, I could not put this book down. It isn't a lengthy tome by any stretch of the imagination, a short 200+ pages, and it isn't very complicated, but it is a fast read and actually has a bit of "hmm, maybe we should think on this more" flavor to it. I would highly recommend this book to anybody out there and intend to put it into the hands of my mother the next time I see her.

My only concern in giving this to my mom to read is that she may just decide to introduce these ideas to her Creative Crones quilting group and then there is no telling where things might end up.

And once you've read this you'll understand that I intend to some day start my own Book Group from Hell as I approach middle age.....