Women Humor

Alice Pearse is a mostly happily married mother of three, an attentive daughter, an ambivalent dog owner, a part-time editor, a loyal neighbor, and a Zen commuter. She is not: a cook, a craftswoman, a decorator, an active PTA member, a natural caretaker, or the breadwinner. But when her husband makes a radical career change, Alice is ready to lean in - and she knows exactly how lucky she is to land a job at Scroll, a hip, young startup that promises to be the future of reading.

Melanie knew someone should have kept Barry Turk on a short leash. The star Poodle handler and lady killer had a habit of chicanery that bred contempt in the dog show circuit. But when Barry is shot dead in his own driveway, even Melanie is stunned at how unsporting the competition can get. Now, as Melanie digs for clues deep under Connecticut's well-groomed surface, she finds herself sniffing around in the killer's own backyard, and counts herself lucky to have the animal instincts to keep herself alive. .

At fifty-three, Maggie Harris has a good marriage and two mostly happy children. Perpetually anxious, she’s also accumulated a list of semi-reasonable fears: falling air conditioners, the IRS, identity theft, skydiving, and airbag recalls. But never once did Maggie worry that her husband of nearly thirty years would leave her.

When 73-year-old Jen announces that she is going to marry Eddie, a man she met just a few months previously on a beach on Boxing Day, her four best friends from aqua aerobics are flabbergasted. The wedding is booked and, when the groom decides to have a stag trip to Las Vegas, the ladies arrange a hen party to beat all others - a week in the city of love, Paris.

After years of struggling to make ends meet, Ginny, a single mom from Queens, falls for sweet divorced Jeff and relishes the idea of moving with her quirky eleven-year-old daughter Harri to his home in an upscale New Jersey suburb. Even though she's never been impressed by material things, she is thrilled that getting a second chance at love comes with the added bonus of finally giving Harri everything she never could before. Ginny is quickly thrust into the complicated realities of a neighborhood defined by ever-shifting alliances of PTA moms and their mean-girl daughters.

The day her children leave home, Eva climbs into bed and stays there. She's had enough - of her kids' carelessness, her husband's thoughtlessness and of the world's general indifference. Brian can't believe his wife is doing this. Who is going to make dinner? But Eva won't budge; and soon she realises to her horror that everyone has been taking her for granted - including herself.

Lady Cop Makes Trouble sets Constance loose on the streets of New York City and New Jersey - tracking down victims, trailing leads, and making friends with girl reporters and lawyers at a hotel for women. Cheering her on, and goading her, are her sisters, Norma and Fleurette - that is, when they aren't training pigeons for the war effort or fanning dreams of a life on the stage.

If you’ve ever been a room parent or school volunteer, Jen Dixon is your hero. She says what every class mom is really thinking, whether in her notoriously frank emails or standup-worthy interactions with the micromanaging PTA President and the gamut of difficult parents. Luckily, she has the charm and wit to get away with it - most of the time. Jen is sassier than ever but dealing with a whole new set of challenges in the world of parental politics and at home.

Olivia “Liv” Fitzgerald’s life is on ambition autopilot. The soon-to-be-lawyer has her life plan set and can talk anyone into anything. Well, almost anything. When her scheming aunt throws her cousin, Kali, into a competition for Southern Charm’s cover alongside Liv’s best friend, Leighton, all hell breaks loose.

To the rest of the world, Polly Solo-Miller Demarest lives a charmed life. She has a beautiful home, a dashing lawyer husband, and two delightful children. But beneath this idyllic surface, the pressure of being the “perfect flower” of an illustrious family—and a stable, always-available wife, mother, and daughter—are getting to her. The spark has gone out of her marriage, and to her own surprise, she’s having an affair. What follows is at once cathartic and provoking, and both may be necessary states in order for Polly to become the kind of person she wants to be.

Katie Chandler had always heard that New York is a weird and wonderful place, but this small-town Texas gal had no idea how weird until she moved there. Everywhere she goes, she sees something worth gawking at and Katie is afraid she's a little too normal to make a splash in the big city. Working for an ogre of a boss doesn't help. Then, seemingly out of the blue, Katie gets a job offer from Magic, Spells, and Illusions, Inc., a company that tricks of the trade to the magic community. For MSI, Katie's ordinariness is an asset.

Rose Lloyd was the last to suspect that Nathan, her husband of over twenty years, was having an affair, and that he was planning to leave her. But the greatest shock was yet to come; for his mistress was Rose's colleague and friend, Minty. So Rose was left alone in their once-happy family home, where she and Nathan had brought up their children.

Ramona has a bratty boss, a potty-training toddler, a critical and over-sharing mom, and oops—a cheating husband. That’s how a Category Four hurricane bearing down on her life in Savannah becomes just another item on her to-do list. In the next forty-eight hours she’ll add a neighborhood child and the class guinea pig named Clarence Thomas to her entourage as she struggles to evacuate town.

Both a hysterical tell-all memoir of the author's stumbles and triumphs in becoming mindfully masculine, as well as a practical drivers manual for navigating the twists and turns of mature manhood, Mindful Masculinity is a joy to read or to listen to. Scott Grace, once a prolific recording artist and stand-up comedian who opened for Robin Williams and many other legends, brings his comic touch to a very serious subject.

Stella's mama never should've put Stella on the church prayer list. With Stella's 27th birthday coming up fast, Nancy desperately wants to see her daughter married and giving her grandbabies. Petitioning heaven seems like a surefire way to get it done. But in Cadillac, Texas, where the gossip's hotter than the city's famous jalapeño peppers, it isn't long before all hell breaks loose.

When Kathleen Deane’s husband, Tom, tells her he's no longer happy with his life and their marriage, Kathleen is confused. They live in Kansas. They’ve been married thirty years. Who said anything about being happy? But with Tom off finding himself, Kathleen starts to think about what she wants. And her thoughts lead her to a small beach community on the east coast, a town called Whitbey that has always looked lovely in the Christmas letters her childhood friend Josie sends every year.

And...she's off. Eighty-year-old Herra Bjornsson, one of the most original narrators in literary history, takes listeners along with her on a dazzling ride of a novel that spans the events and locales of the 20th century. As she lies alone in that garage in the heart of Reykjavik, waiting to die, Herra reflects - in a voice by turns darkly funny, bawdy, poignant, and always, always smart - on the mishaps, tragedies, and turns of luck that took her from Iceland to Nazi Germany, from the United States to Argentina and back to a post-crash, high-tech, modern Iceland.

Marion Palm prefers not to think of herself as a thief but rather "a woman who embezzles". Over the years she has managed to steal $180,000 from her daughters' private school, money that has paid for European vacations, a Sub-Zero refrigerator, and perpetually unused state-of-the-art exercise equipment. But now, when the school faces an audit, Marion pulls piles of rubber-banded cash from their basement hiding places and flees, leaving her family to grapple with the baffled detectives, the irate school board, and the mother-shaped hole in their house.

Connie Nixon makes a shocking discovery: her youngest daughter, Jessica, now living in New York City, is part owner of a wildly successful sex toy shop. Startled by this knowledge, Connie sets out to reconnect with Jessica and finds herself living the life she's always dreamed about.

‘I never once attended a Sunday morning church service in Stanford. There was always the feeling that they weren’t aimed at families like ours.’ Pam Ayres was the sixth child in a hard-up family who lived in a council house, her parents’ generation were harrowed by the war. Yet they lived by the green in the village of Stanford in the Vale, where everything you needed was within walking distance and the sound of motorcars was rarely heard.