Carousel of Progress

the long version

Meet Meredith Herman, a fourteen-year-old expert witness to the slow unraveling of her parents' marriage amid the lunacy of Los Angeles, 1978, a world of bell-bottoms, grapefruit diets, and plastic surgery. Meredith is a girl of a specific time and place tackling the universal challenges of boys, school, and parents. Her mother, Leigh, is a housewife suffering an excruciating and often hilarious midlife discontent, a malaise that leaves Meredith's father, Robert, genuinely baffled. As Leigh attempts to reinvent herself as a liberated lady - complete with assertiveness-training classes and a dalliance with an exotic artist - Robert runs for cover into a hasty second marriage. Through it all, Meredith and Leigh struggle in a combative mother-daughter relationship as wonderfully real as any in contemporary fiction. Tanney's debut sparkles with pitch-perfect dialogue and an astonishingly accurate sense of place. This novel will take readers on ajourney of belly laughs and heartbreak. The Herman family's story will charm and captivate you long after you've turned the last page.From the Hardcover edition.