Searching for Paradise in Parker, PA

Addy Lipton has been married to the same man for 28 years. She's had enough of Lucky's "kingdom of krap" (their garage stuffed with bowling balls and seemingly useless machine parts) and the unrelenting dullness of their life together. Disaster strikes when Lucky needs back surgery and a planned trip to Costa Rica for a second honeymoon is cancelled. Barbara McCulloch voices this story of ordinary people with everyday problems, creating well-drawn secondary characters such as Addy's hapless husband, Lucky, and her free-thinking sister, Hel. McCulloch's performance highlights all of Addy's resentments and turmoil. And as she begins to discover her own needs and enjoy the company of an understanding group of women, McCulloch makes Addy's personal awakening empowering. This is definitely chick-lit beach reading. S.J.H. (c) AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine

December 31, 2007
Radish's novel suffers in the transition to audio. Her constant detailed analyses of the main character's emotions, her endless descriptions and her numerous similar scenes of women friends bonding and bashing the men in their lives becomes tedious and repetitive when read aloud on audio and slows the pace to a snail's crawl. This is an audiobook that cries out for abridgment. Barbara McCulloh reads with expression, and her tone conveys sympathy and compassion for the characters' situations, but she does little to differentiate the voices of the female characters, so they all blur together in the listeners' mind, indistinguishable from each other. This is a novel better enjoyed in print than on audio. Simultaneous release with the Bantam hardcover (Reviews, Jan. 21).

January 21, 2008
Radish’s latest warm-fuzzy (after The Sunday List of Dreams
) tracks the troubled marriage of Lucky and Addy Lipton. Lucky’s Kingdom of Krap—the garage littered with dismantled appliances, an old car and every other project Lucky never finished—has brought Addy nearly to the breaking point in her stale marriage, but it’s the last straw when their planned trip to Costa Rica (with its possibilities for romantic rejuvenation) doesn’t happen. What ensues is a summer of separation, discovering personal desires and strong female friendships (it is, after all, a Radish book). As the summer gives way to fall, Lucky tries to win his wife back, while Addy is torn between living alone or giving the marriage another go. Girl-power readers will get a kick out of the hokey girl get-togethers, and women will surely connect with Radish’s empowered femmes.