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Summary
Summary
Claire Cook's beguilingly original Ready to Fall struck a vibrant chord with its "perky take on midlife angst" (Publishers Weekly). In Must Love Dogs she gives us a contemporary Everywoman in a big rollicking south-of-Boston Irish family-a zany novel with the flavor of Nora Ephron, Susan Isaacs, and Jeanne Ray's Julie and Romeo. Forty-year-old Sarah Hurlihy, a divorced preschool teacher whose life is her classroom, is about to meet her first date in more than a decade. It was the "Loves Dogs" that hooked her in the personal ad, and now she is scanning her neighborhood café for the man with a yellow rose. And find him she does, but he's the last person on earth she expects to find there . . . In Must Love Dogs, hilarious missteps abound. Sarah's widowed father, Billy Hurlihy, with six adult kids, is seeing at least two women. And he and Sarah aren't the only Hurlihys with romantic challenges. Her brother Michael, for one, has a rocky marriage that Mother Teresa, his St. Bernard, just may put over the edge. With self-deprecating humor and a laugh-out-loud view of the way we live now, including shar pei/Labrador crosses and a transgenerational body-piercing experience, Must Love Dogs is a perfect beach read that melts the heartache of dating with warmth and humor.
Author Notes
A teacher of physical fitness and creative writing, Claire Cook has had previous stints as a copywriter, radio continuity director, garden designer, and dance choreographer. She lives in Scituate, Massachusetts, with her husband and two children.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Following up on themes from her debut novel, Ready to Fall, which looked at the pitfalls of cyberspace romance, Cook here chronicles the perils of various tried and true dating ploys, from personals ads to the use of adorable pooches as date bait. "If I didn't have a job, I might have stayed in bed until I rotted," muses Massachusetts preschool teacher Sarah Hurlihy, almost 41, divorced and dateless for two years. She's out to change all that when she bravely answers a personals ad in a local paper, but instead gets the ultimate nightmarish response her would-be date turns out to be her widower father, something her sprawling Irish Catholic family naturally finds wildly funny. Her oldest sister, Carol, decides the best way for Sarah to move on is to create her own personals ad, and soon Sarah's love life is lively, if not downright rambunctious. "God hates glib," "God hates ugly" and "God hates a smarty-pants" are all standards in the Hurlihy family lexicon, but Cook employs just enough glibness and smarty-pants humor to make this tart slice-of-the-single-life worth reading. As for "ugly," Sarah also learns some serious lessons about what the word really means and it's not a prospective suitor's nose hairs, his bald pate or his beer-belly bulge. Breezy first-person narration makes this a fast-paced, humorous diversion. Agent, Lisa Bankoff. (July 8) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
For recently divorced preschool teacher Sarah Hurlihy, life begins at 40. With nagging support from her fiercely loyal and affectionate Irish American family, Sarah answers a personal ad, assuming this is the safest way to dive back into the dating pool. Her first blind date has Sarah looking for a "hopelessly romantic widower, young fifties, carrying a single yellow rose" and discovering her roguish father. After some ribbing from her family, Sarah answers another ad and borrows her brother's Saint Bernard puppy to meet John Anderson, a self-proclaimed Harrison Ford look-alike who has borrowed a neighbor's yappy Yorkie. Her attempts at a social life culminate in a Friday night spent in her bedroom with a bottle of wine, answering more personal ads between calls to her family for help. Meanwhile, one of her father's current girlfriends, "Dracula Dolly," is camped out on Sarah's couch entertaining Bob, the boyish father of one of Sarah's students, and the nerdish John. It's raining men, family, humor, and tragicomic angst in Cook's latest novel for older fans of Bridget Jones. Kaite Mediatore.
Library Journal Review
This utterly charming second novel by Cook (Ready To Fall) is a fun read, perfect for whiling away an afternoon on the beach. Sarah Hurlihy is 40 years old, divorced, and happily teaching preschoolers a multicultural curriculum. But her interfering, overzealous Boston Irish family thinks that she should be dating, and with much love she is pushed into answering a personal ad from a gentleman seeking a lady "who enjoys elegant dining, dancing and the slow bloom of affection"; the clincher is that he's a man who "loves dogs." That man turns out to be the last man on earth any woman would want to date, but Sarah pushes on, slowly falling headlong into the dating game with decidedly mixed results. Meanwhile, Sarah's widowed father has his own dating troubles, brother Michael is deep in marital problems, and sister Carol is having difficulty at home with her temperamental teenage daughter, who turns to her favorite aunt for comfort and body-piercing support. Somehow, they all seem to end up on Sarah's doorstep at the most inopportune moments, keeping the laughs going all the way to the not-quite-storybook-perfect ending. Suitable for all public libraries. Stacy Alesi, Palm Beach Cty. Lib. Syst., Boca Raton, FL (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
