Must Love Dogs

Claire Cook's histrionic story features divorcée Sarah Hurlihy, a preschool teacher whose love life becomes the center of attention for her meddling family after her sister places a provocative personal ad on her behalf. Hurlihy must deal with a diverse group of suitors while also trying to control her widower father and his demanding girlfriends. Carrington MacDuffie is an ideal reader, who has a superb sense of timing that will make most listeners laugh. At times, MacDuffie delivers the story with a straight face while at others she simply shares the audience's amusement at the novel's seemingly unending chain of hysterical events and characters. MUST LOVE DOGS is the perfect book for people who want a reason to smile. D.J.S. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award (c) AudioFile 2006, Portland, Maine

May 27, 2002
Following up on themes from her debut novel, Ready to Fall, which looked at the pitfalls of cyberspace romance, Cook here chronicles the perils of various tried and true dating ploys, from personals ads to the use of adorable pooches as date bait. "If I didn't have a job, I might have stayed in bed until I rotted," muses Massachusetts preschool teacher Sarah Hurlihy, almost 41, divorced and dateless for two years. She's out to change all that when she bravely answers a personals ad in a local paper, but instead gets the ultimate nightmarish response—her would-be date turns out to be her widower father, something her sprawling Irish Catholic family naturally finds wildly funny. Her oldest sister, Carol, decides the best way for Sarah to move on is to create her own personals ad, and soon Sarah's love life is lively, if not downright rambunctious. "God hates glib," "God hates ugly" and "God hates a smarty-pants" are all standards in the Hurlihy family lexicon, but Cook employs just enough glibness and smarty-pants humor to make this tart slice-of-the-single-life worth reading. As for "ugly," Sarah also learns some serious lessons about what the word really means—and it's not a prospective suitor's nose hairs, his bald pate or his beer-belly bulge. Breezy first-person narration makes this a fast-paced, humorous diversion. Agent, Lisa Bankoff.