Lipman (The Ladies Man) sets her breezy, workmanlike novel in King George, N.H., a small town where the sudden accidental deaths of a secretly engaged couple summon their two grown-up children to sort out the conundrum of their relation to each other. Both the dead woman's stoical daughter, Sunny Batten, and the man's cranky son, Fletcher Finn, possess an identical corona of satiny gray hair; both are 31; and neither has ever met the other, although their parents have been on-and-off lovers for years. Sunny, who lives in New York, grew up with her mother in King George, and as a girl was a serious golfer. Fletcher, who grew up in Pennsylvania, has just gotten himself fired as campaign manager to Emily Ann Grandjean, an annoying, anorexic rich-girl candidate in a New Jersey congressional race. One look at Sunny and Fletcher's resemblance to each other at the funeral and the town is abuzz with conjecture and benign gossip. Novelist Lipman, who knows from smalltown, confidently enters the head of everyone worth meeting in King George: chief of police Joey Loach, who survives a gunshot thanks to his mother's insistence that he wear a bulletproof vest; Sunny's former best friend, Regina, who married the captain of the golf team; and the waitress at the Dot, Winnie, who keeps tabs on everyone. After the initial plot is pleasantly sketched out, the work feels thin, and Lipman resorts to repetitious dialogue and switches in narrative voice to keep the action moving. Major characters like Sunny and Emily Ann begin to sound alike, and Fletcher's initial, endearing prickliness smoothes out predictably to allow Lipman to tidily tie up the ends of this unremarkable, occasionally humorous, mostly conventional light comedy. 12-city author tour. (June 19) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

It is a rare treat to read a book that is at once utterly modern but also evokes the world of Wooster and Jeeves. Lipman, author of The Ladies' Man (1999) and The Inn at Lake Devine (1998), among others, performs just such a combination in her newest novel. As a satire of the political and moneyed world, it is a riot; as an investigation into the secret hearts of women, it is slyly understanding; as a peek into the entangled life of small towns, it is shark-tooth sharp; and as a portrait of a thirtysomething crowd who matured together from high school, it is nothing short of brilliant. Lipman opens all these worlds to her gently mocking microscope as she follows the lives of characters not used to self-examination: the former high-school jock turned husband, the rich girl seeking a cause, the sheriff with the overly protective mother, and the intertwined quest of unknown siblings. The result is a story so funny and so pleasurable that the reader can only wish it did not have to end. --Neal Wyatt

Another sharply observed, if avowedly romantic, comedy of manners from Lipman (The Ladies’ Man, 1999, etc.), an unreconstructed Janeite. Sunny Batten gets jolting news from the King George, New Hampshire, police. Her mother has died of accidental carbon monoxide poisoning, thanks to a faulty furnace. “She and her fiancé didn’t suffer,” the police chief tells her gently over the phone. Sunny—short for Sondra but unreflective of her general outlook on life—is devastated. Though they’d been living apart (college, a series of jobs), she and her mother had always been emotionally close. Or so she’d thought. But when she recovers enough to contemplate something other than her horrific loss, she finds that little in her mother's actual world corresponds to her own idea of it. Fiancé? How could there possibly be such a person when Sunny knew nothing of his existence? In the days that follow she learns much about Margaret Batten that comes as a surprise. Miles Finn, the putative fiancé, had in fact been her mother’s secret lover for well over 30 years. In addition, there is every likelihood that his relationship to Sunny herself was weightier than she had at first been led to believe. And that being the case, certain ancillary conclusions are unavoidable. At the funeral, for instance—the double funeral, that is—Fletcher Finn, son of the deceased Miles, a brash young man only slightly younger than 31-year-old Sunny, materializes—disconcertingly. Which is to say that his resemblance to her is so striking that the assembled King George folks gasp collectively, leaving Sunny to consider the sudden, unnerving possibility of siblinghood. But not every revelation is disquieting. This is Lipman, after all, and the sensitive, kind police chief turns out to be Joey Loach, who sometimes sat behind Sunny—rather yearningly—in high school study hall. Austen would have approved: astringency with a happy ending.

Readers can count on Lipman for stylish, sprightly novels imbued with a deep affection for her all-too-human characters. Her newest offering continues the high standard set by her first novel, Then She Found Me (LJ 3/15/90), and continued through her recent The Ladies' Man (LJ 6/1/99). When Sunny Batten, now in her early thirties, returns home to tiny King George, NH, following the accidental death of her mother and her mother's fianc?, Miles Finn, she is thrown back into a milieu that she had gladly left years before. Sunny, the most talented golfer in high school, has nothing but unhappy memories of her adolescence, when she and her mother braved the displeasure of the town by forcing the school administration to make her a member of the previously all-male school golf team. The caring and sympathy that she now receives from everyone she meets comes as a shock, as does meeting Miles Finn's son, Fletcher. Fletcher could be her twin: he has the same facial structure and the same flyaway, prematurely gray hair. Were there pockets in her mother's past of which Sunny was unaware? In this delightfully breezy novel, Sunny learns that you can go home again, with surprisingly happy results. For all public libraries. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 2/01/01.] Nancy Pearl, Washington Ctr. for the Book, Seattle (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.