Penelope Lemon

June 15, 2018
A recently divorced, financially struggling mom faces online dating challenges when a nude picture of her surfaces on the internet.You would think things couldn't get worse for Penelope Lemon. Since the timer ran out on her marriage to the biggest nerd in her neck of Virginia, she and her son--bullied and dubbed Fart Boy by his schoolmates--have had to move into her parents' basement. Her job as the top waitress at Coonskins, a so-called roadhouse where bus tours unload patrons to compete for tables with "a once-in-a-lifetime view of the parking lot and the traffic on Lee Highway," could easily be mistaken for one of the circles of hell. For a 40th birthday gift, her mother has bought her a Christian dating app called Divote, where she's begun to receive messages from hunky prospects like BrettCorinthians2:2, but her best friends, Sandy and Rachel, are convinced she'd be better off doing macrame or reading The Kite Runner than wading back into the dating pool. Then something happens to prove their point. While navigating through the porn-site pop-ups that make it so annoying to use her father's ancient computer, she's sucked in by an ad for PaybacksAreHeaven.com. There she finds herself particularly engaged by a photo of a sleepy redhead on a waterbed. Then the memories come flooding back. "Yes, now that she thought of it, she had definitely posed nude while hitting a bong. The bong was green. Her name was Tinkerbell. Recalling all this, Penelope spent a moment wondering if she was really meant for life in the middle class." Majors (Loves Winning Plays, 2012, etc.) writes lines like that for breakfast, so you'll want to stay for lunch.A light and lively sendup of modern woes.

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August 1, 2018
Penelope Lemon is in a rut. She is the twice-divorced single mother to Theo, affectionately known as Fart Boy to his classmates, and has found herself once again living under her mother's roof. The multiple digital-dating platforms Penelope uses have turned up fruitless thus far, and after a physical altercation with a customer she was serving at Coonskins, a frontier-themed diner, she is fresh out of a job. To top it all off, tasteful nudes taken of Penelope in college were stolen from the home of her first husband and posted on a revenge-porn site. Penelope is in dire need of a guardian angel when fellow single mother Missy walks into her life. Like Penelope, Missy reads erotic novels at Little League baseball practices and loves to have a good time. Missy sets Penelope up with a job at the trailer park Missy's father owns and helps pull Penelope from her deeply downward spiral. A laugh-out-loud-funny tale of misfortune and female friendship, Majors' (Love's Winning Plays, 2012) latest is a riot from beginning to end.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)