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Summary
Summary
Patty Jane's House of Curl
Author Notes
Author Lorna Lanvik was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota in 1954. After high school graduation, she and a friend traveled in Europe and settled in Bavaria where they worked as hotel chamber maids and English tutors. After returning to the United States, she briefly attended the University of Minnesota before moving to San Francisco to perform stand-up and improvisational comedy. She moved to Los Angeles, where she did stand-up comedy at the Comedy Store and The Improv as well as worked a variety of temporary jobs including one at the Playboy Mansion and another at Atlantic Records.
She is an actor and playwright who has performed in plays she has written and produced. She has appeared in numerous plays including Bad Seed, Lunatic Cellmates, and Valley of the Dolls. She has written six novels and currently lives in Minneapolis with her husband and two daughters.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
"Homespun wisdom peppers every page" of this first novel that centers on the neighborhood beauty shop, according to PW. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
Former standup comic Landvik debuts with a homespun beauty- parlor melodrama, Minneapolis-set. Patty Jane is 21 when she marries Thor, an impossibly handsome architect-in-training. Impregnated on their wedding night, she feels her husband growing painfully distant as her girth increases. After a fight, Thor disappears for good. Disconsolate Patty Jane is tended by her sister Harriet, who's madly in love with Avel, pint- sized heir to a cereal fortune. Then Avel is killed in a plane crash. Cut forward a decade. Patty Jane is now the proprietor of the House of Curl, a needlepoint-appointed beauty parlor where a gang of salt-of-the-earth locals with names like Inky and Crabby gathers for restorative good-ol'-gal group therapy. Harriet plays her harp; Thor's mother bakes; handsome Clyde Chuka does manicures. Patty Jane even introduces a House of Curl lecture series, in which the girls hold forth on their obsessions: Decorating with Fabrics, Legends of Hollywood. But then Harriet starts to drink. She walks out on home and harp, and soon is panhandling, turning tricks, and vomiting in dumpsters. Meanwhile, Patty Jane, missing her sister, falls into Clyde Chuka's arms. Later, a recovering alcoholic cop named Reese befriends down-and-out Harriet and lures her to A.A.; she slowly works at being sober, then rejoins her family, Reese in tow. One day, though, Harriet spots a familiar-looking zombie: Thor, brain-damaged on the night of his long-ago fight with Patty Jane, has been kept prisoner by a crazy former oral surgeon. He's rescued and welcomed back into the House of Curl circle. But then Harriet is diagnosed with lung cancer, and the gang gathers for a teary deathbed scene beforeguess what?bounding spunkily back. Though the elaborately crafted wackiness and cloying coziness of the beauty-parlor scene will annoy some, readers hungry for an easy-to-swallow tale of femalenot feministsolidarity may find this a satisfying, sugary treat.
Library Journal Review
When her husband, Thor, disappears on the eve of the birth of their first child, Patty Jane is philosophical. Her sister Harriet and her mother-in-law stand by and offer support. After the baby is born, Patty Jane opts for beauty school as a way to make a living and establishes the House of Curl. Over the next 30 years, the House of Curl becomes a cultural center in the suburbs of the Twin Cities, Minnesota. Customers can get a perm, hear a lecture, drink coffee, catch up on news, learn a new skill, find a babysitter, or just hang out. The cast of eccentric characters make life at the House of Curl both amusing and enjoyable. The exaggeratedly odd twists and turns of life in this environment keep the listener guessing, with tragedy following comedy. Author Landvik reads in flat Minnesotan tones. Recommended.Joanna M. Burkhardt, Univ. of Rhode Island Coll. of Continuing Education Lib., Providence (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Prologue PATTY JANE KEPT a drawer full of cotton bandanas spritzed with dimestore perfume - Tabu and Evening in Paris and, occasionally, My Sin, which I thought was a chic as chic could get. I helped out at the House of Curl after school and on Saturdays. Whenever anyone stank up the place with a permanent wave, I would be called upon to distribute the bandanas and tie them carefully, the way a nurse ties a doctor's surgical mask, over the nose and mouth of our customers. Everyone in the shop wore them (except for Clyde Chuka, the manicurist, who said Tabu gave him a worse headache than permanent-wave solution) so that the room looked overtaken by a bunch of Old West bandits assembled for a Dippety-Doo heist. "Scented kerchiefs are one of the nice touches that separates our establishment from the others," Patty Jane often said. Other nice touches included homemade banana bread served with coffee to women basting under hair dryers; pale green smocks monogrammed with the initials of our regulars (we kept a supply of less personalized smocks--"V.I.P" and "First Lady"--on hand for walk-ins); and harp concerts courtesy of my Aunt Harriet, whose accompaniment to my bandana distribution was always the William Tell Overture. Patty Jane, my mother, was big on nice touches. "For cripes' sake," she said, "if you can't be a class act, why bother?" She studied what society news was to be found in the Minneapolis Star as if she were a candidate for a PhD in High Living; she drove her rattly old DeSota around Lake of the Isles, picking out mansions she would live in were her inheritance more sizable than a pair of turquoise cuff links and an incomplete set of 1947 World Books; she tried on designer dresses at Dayton's Oval Room and Powers and then had my grandmother sew up copies on her heavy black Pfaff sewing machine. "Just because my life began in the bargain basement," she said, "doesn't mean I can't take the escalator to Fine Crystals." Truth be told, if my mother were to spend any time in Fine Crystals, it was guaranteed something would break. Excerpted from Patty Jane's House of Curl by Lorna Landvik All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.