by Fay Weldon
Weldon (Big Girls Don't Cry) can be wickedly funny, and this latest novel allows her ample opportunity to cast a sharp satirical eye on a host of human and institutional foibles. The fun begins when single, workaholic, 32-year-old London film editor Sophia Moore travels to Rhode Island to help settle her grandmother Felicity into the Golden Bowl Complex, a nursing home from hell. Instead of adapting to the New Age home's routine of compulsory touchy-feely life-affirmation sessions, the feisty, much-married 83-year-old Felicity finds love with a 72-year-old gamblin' man, and—quite literally—it's off to the races.
Meanwhile, Felicity's chance remark that she'd once given up a child for adoption sends Sophia on a search for long-lost family in England. Her mission turns up a couple of grasping grotesques, out to snag anything they can get. While we may chuckle at their antics, Weldon weighs in cleverly on family reunions run amok and the perils of infantilizing the elderly. (Atlantic Monthly, $24)
Bottom Line: Witty send-up of nursing home evils
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