I Still Dream About You

October 4, 2010
Flagg's whimsical heartstring tugger (after Can't Wait to Get to Heaven) follows the continually interrupted suicide attempt of a former Birmingham, Ala., beauty queen, now 60 and a realtor. The 2008 election is hitting the home stretch as former Miss Alabama, Maggie Fortenberry, plans her exit from a world she can no longer bear. Still grieving over the loss of her best friend and unceasingly optimistic boss, Hazel Whizenknott, Maggie feels like a failure: the business is in decline, and she's lamenting a lifetime's worth of chances missed, including turning down her one true love. In fact, she's come up with 16 "perfectly good reasons to jump in the river" and only two reasons not to. Of course, there is hope to be found—professionally, personally, perhaps romantically—even in Maggie's darkest hours. Flagg gives the story some breadth with a subplot about a friend's campaign to become Birmingham's first black mayor. Maggie's quandary, meanwhile, is detailed with Flagg's trademark light touch and a sincere wit that's heavier on heart than sass.

October 15, 2010

Life keeps interrupting a former beauty queen's planned suicide in Flagg's latest (Can't Wait to Get to Heaven, 2006, etc.) take on Southern womanhood.

Maggie Fortenberry, Miss Alabama circa the late 1960s, is not exactly depressed, but at age 60, toiling as a Birmingham Realtor as the housing bubble implodes, she simply finds life too burdensome. So she's planned a graceful exit, donating her sparse but tasteful wardrobe, paying her bills, leaving the balance of her meager bank account to charity, etc. She's set her suicide for late October 2008, when Brenda, her best friend and colleague at Red Mountain Realty, convinces her she must see the Whirling Dervishes during their one-night-only November appearance in Birmingham. Maggie reschedules her date with doom, but pretexts for further postponements pop up. Crestview, a mansion originally owned by Scottish industrialist and Birmingham city father Edward Crocker, is coming on the market, and Maggie suspends genteel despair long enough to snatch the listing from Red Mountain's archrival in realty, Babs Bingington, the Beast of Birmingham. Not only did Babs indirectly cause the death of Red Mountain's revered founder, the miniscule but irrepressible Hazel, but thanks to Babs' scorched-earth sales tactics, Birmingham's historic homes are being razed and replaced by shoddily constructed, vulgar monstrosities. Once Crestview is safely sold, an auto accident and grateful goat farmers present further impediments to self-destruction. Not to mention the skeleton, dressed in full Scots regalia, discovered in Crestview's attic. Or Brenda's compulsive overeating, which lands her in the hospital. The early sections of the novel evoke sympathy for Maggie as she rifles her catalog of regrets: her sabotaged chances at the Miss America crown, failed love affairs, thwarted dreams of success in the Big Apple and general incompetence at everything except beauty—now rapidly fading. Although the plot may justify tarring its villain or deifying its savior too broadly, there is no excuse for the Hazel-ex-machina ending.

What could have been an edgy excursion into the individual toll of the Recession on real women devolves into fluff. 

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October 15, 2010
Leave it to Flagg (Cant Wait to Get to Heaven, 2006) to find the folksy southern charm in depressionboth economic and personal. Her latest breezy page-turner centers on Maggie Fortenberry, an aging former Miss Alabama, now real-estate agent, who can still turn heads. Polite to a fault, Maggie always tries to appear happy, but she is buckling under the weight of disappointments. As she prepares to make a drastic change, a tug-of-war with archrival Babs Bingington over a particularly desirable property alters Maggies plans. Events, including the appearance of a mysterious skeleton (in a complete non sequitur of a subplot), conspire to show her that life itself was something to look forward to. Flagg surrounds Maggie with a supporting cast of colorful characters, including the indelible Hazel Whisenknott, a three-foot, four-inch dynamo, and Brenda Peoples, who keeps a ready stash of emergency chocolate. As always, Flagg brings her light touch to weighty topics, deftly skewering contemporary culture (tattoos and McMansions, for starters), while holding up Maggie as a model of good old-fashioned civility, manners, and ethical behavior. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Beloved, best-selling Flaggs latest will be actively promoted with online appearances and should quickly become a book-club favorite.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)