Carol Anshaw

2.5 stars.

I should have passed on this book. I read one of her others a few years back and it was, how do I say it, a little better than this one.

I almost gave up half way through but decided to finish it just to get it over with.

This family was truly the most dysfunctional family I've read about. It started out with one sister's wedding (Carmen) which ended in tragedy with her brother's (Nick) girlfriend driving erratically and then the whole book was one tragedy after another to me. They were all different personalities with issues of their own throughout the whole book. Alice was sort of okay but her on/off relationship with her lesbian girlfriend got a little old and the sex was not graphic but too much for me and I'm not a prude.… (mere)

In a word, Lucky in the Corner is about relationships. Okay, two words: complicated relationships. Nora and Fern have a strained mother-daughter relationship. Nora had Fern at a young age essentially defying her own deep rooted lesbian reality: she first kissed a girl at age twelve. Now, in a romantic relationship with sophisticated Jeanne, Nora is trying to find common ground with defiant Fern. Her daughter is the type of girl to get a tattoo just to piss off a parent.
Fern works as a psychic knowing full well this too is something her mother will never understand. To be fair, Fern has an uneasy relationship with her mother because she can never quite trust Nora will always be there for Fern. She has felt her mother could disappear at any second, exactly like a not-quite-there hologram. Call it her psychic abilities but Fern senses her mother's betrayals before they happen. Beyond navigating a complicated relationship with her mother, Fern is also coping with a breakup, the changing relationship with her best friend (who is now a mother herself), and the peripheral relationships with her mother's girlfriend, Jeanne and Fern's cross dressing uncle, Harold. The only relationship not changing too much is the one Fern has with her dog, Lucky.… (mere)