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The Best Place to Be by Lesley Dormen is a novel in stories about a fifty something New Yorker named Grace.

From the back cover:

At fifty, Grace Hanford has lived long enough to be a daughter, a stepdaughter, a girlfriend, a sister, a sister-in-law, a wife, a stepmother, and an orphan. She has fallen in and out of love — with troublesome men, with her glamorous mother, with her wild best friend, and with New York City — more times than she can count. Still, Grace is more comic than melancholic, and a gifted confessor. She lives life as if every day is a movie in which her role is yet to be determined — and her audience loves her for it.

In The Best Place to Be, we follow Grace from her fatherless childhood through her years at an all-girls college to adulthood in the city and her many dating escapades (and escapes) as an urban sophisticate. Wherever she may be, Grace tries to find her place in the world with humor and the blunt surprise of truth. And always, in the background, there is Grace’s mother, brother, and the man she could or might or will call husband, out of reach — until she reaches.

In the tradition of Melissa Bank’s The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing, The Best Place to Be is at once funny, moving, and deeply provocative, a love letter to the self-determined woman that shimmers with hilarious insight and graceful wit.

I have a confession to make, I feel like a total idiot.  I had a hard time reading The Best Place to Be because I felt like it wandered, had a loose focus, and I wasn’t sure where it was supposed to be going.  About half way through the book I realize that it’s a novel in stories!  A collection of stories that create the whole.  Well, no wonder I was confused!  Now it all made sense!  This was the fault of me as a reader, and not of the author.  There it was right on the front cover:  A Novel in Stories.  I  can see now all the formatting clues me in.  I’m just dumb that way sometimes.  Because I was confused with the timeline of each new chapter, my enjoyment of this book was impacted.  I’m positive if I were to go back and reread the book everything would be clear and make sense.

I kinda feel guilty that I couldn’t figure out this seemingly simple fact before the first one hundred pages.  What do you think?  Has this ever happened to you as a reader?  As a reader what are your responsibilities coming into the book?  Should I have been responsible for picking up on the formatting on my own?  Do you sometimes feel like your a really good reader but then something comes along and you realize that maybe you’re not as hot as you once thought you were?  (On a sidenote:  Shannon Hale has been discussing this in a current series)

While The Best Place to Be is promoted as funny, it didn’t find myself chuckling.  This is probably because I didn’t have much in common with the main character and couldn’t relate to the humorous aspects.  I’m a married almost thirty something stay at home mom with  two kids under the age of three, live in the suburbs, thinks that having sex with a married man is immoral and have no idea what it’s like to walk into a store and spend thousands of dollars on clothes that I don’t need.  But yet, Grace thinks nothing of it.  It’s the norm of her life.  I think we just have different norms.

But that’s what I appreciated about The Best Place to Be.  I was transported into another person’s life and got to live vicariously through the main character and her story and learn something about the world and people that I wouldn’t experience on my own.  So while I didn’t think it was “smack-your-forehead familiar and so crazily funny you could cry” (from O, The Oprah Magazine), isn’t that one of the reasons for reading in the first place?  To live and learn from other characters and settings?

So if you are aging gracefully (or not so gracefully) into your midlife,  live in the big city, shop like money doesn’t mean anything, have a mother who divorces and remarries often, are seeking a reconciliation with a father you never really knew, feel awkward when talking to your brother, can fly to Rome at the drop of a hat, and see a psychologist often then The Best Place to Be is the book for you.  And even if your not but would like to immerse yourself into Grace’s life as she experiences all the above and more then this book is for you.  While I appreciated it’s appeal, I just don’t think I was the right type of person for this book.  But you just might be.

Lesley Dormen’s website, read an excerpt from the book, Q & A with the author, and bio.  Thank you to TLC Book Tours for making the Maw Books Blog a stop for The Best Place to Be.  Read more reviews from others on the tour.

Because I received two copies of this book, I would like to pass them on to you when I open up the giveaways for the Reading & Blogging for Darfur campaign.  Hopefully, I’ll have everything organized by the end of this weekend so you can put your name in the virtual hat.

So what do you think of my idiocy?  Have you experienced anything similiar?

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