Satsu Issues an Apology

satsuGood Morning Everyone! My name is Satsu and I’m temping here at The Little Bookstore until March 11. Then I’m moving to DC to pick up some more admin work there.

I’ve arrived in the nick of time here. They sure needed help. The fuzzy guy who runs the bookstore has been dealing with the loss of a personal friend, poor brave soul, plus he’s working three jobs – trying to get a class together for the College for Older Adults, run the bookshop, and renovate a room in Hazel House. (That’s the house he helps run for rescue cats, sweet boy.)

They tell me there’s a lady who works here with the fuzzy guy, but I’ve not seen her – unless she’s that flash of cotton fabrics and hair that whirls through the place about once a week. Someone came in the other day, dropped a suitcase, picked up a suitcase, and left again. That may have been her.

I’m told she just turned in a manuscript for her third book, which is about foster care and adoption. Naturally I assumed it was about cats, but no, it’s human children and social workers and foster care parents, all talking about their experiences. Whatever it was, getting it done on time kept her from putting up any other blogs this week. She left a phone message asking if I could write something, and I’m happy to earn my keep here.

There are just a few temps like me here right now. Four of us started together, but two of the younger girls went out the door a few days later, adopted to forever families. It’s always the cute young ones who go first.

But no worries. Me and this plump older tabby named Nancy Drew, we’re headed out next week, gonna go live in the Big City. I don’t know about Nancy – her goals in life seem to be “Move as little as possible, eat as much as possible” – but me I’m looking forward to life in the fast lane. Papers to pee on, files to eat, online documents to destroy with keyboard crossing – oh, I can’t wait to get started!

So if you were expecting to hear from Fuzzy Guy or Whirling Lady, please be assured they’ll get back in touch next week. I think. He’s up to his ears in faucets and pipes and she’s off someplace doing something for her parents. She’ll be back. Fuzzy Guy is expecting her to help him hold some pipes in place.

Hasta la vista, babes!

The Monday Book: THE COMFORT OF LIES by Randy Susan Myers

This book was in a “Free books” bin at Asheville Public Library. I’d liked her earlier book The Murderer’s Daughters so snagged it. This one is bigger in its character list and plot maneuvers, but like her others, character drives plot. Which is cool.

The two couples and the birth mom/floater in this book are really well drawn. You know them. And you can kind of guess what they’re going to do, but reading how they do it goes from heartbreaking to yelling at the pages “NO DON’T” to laughing because it’s just so funny, what they say as they screw up their own lives.

Dark comedy, or the comedy of human errors, maybe. The premise is that married man Nathan has an affair with Tia, then goes back to his wife. Tia adopts out the resultant daughter, but Nathan’s wife finds out when she opens a letter addressed to her husband. And then finds the adoptive parents, and it just goes kablooey from there. This is a finely chiseled portrait of marriages falling apart and people making choices based on very real issues, some of them rather like watching a train wreck in slow motion.

If you like the genre of fiction Brits call “aga saga,” literate portraits of families and people teetering at the edge of crisis, you’ll love The Comfort of Lies.