Bøker av Jo Barney

Mom has just died, is a patch of floating dust on the Columbia slough. We see the world through the eyes of her ex-hockey player son: divorced, depressed, ready to settle in for thirteen more weeks of unemployment checks, beer, and reading his mother''s books, not thinking, if he can help it, about what happened the last time he was on the ice. Along with her library, Mom has also left him her ancient iMac, a yellow Post-it, his name written in orange felt tip pen on it, stuck to its screen. Sam''s sister, helping him clear their mother''s house, assumes her sarcastic older-sister self, tells Sam that Mom is leaving him her brain. Instead, when he opens the file entitled THREE to GET READY, he finds three stories written by his mother, which will change everything.

Half of Jan Morrison's life is pure chaos, the half that has to do with her family, her sense of wifeliness, motherliness, womanliness. The other half, the half in which she counsels children whose own lives are as chaotic as hers, is the core of her days, and she is pretty successful at it even though she comes to school hungover, popping breath mints, unsympathetic toward little girls who suck their thumbs, and incapable of calling her autocratic principal by his first name. Asshole seems a much more fitting label.Then Mr. Peterson warns her that her days at James Lee Elementary School are numbered. RIFFING: reduction in force. Six weeks, to be exact. And her only hope of survival is to cure the six most problematic kids in the school or at least make them disappear from the principal's radar.Between her divorce and her unsympathetic school principal, Jan is almost as unstable as the kids in her Wednesday Club who are not following the rules and are creating havoc in classrooms and on the playground. Mr. Pedersen has given her the edict "cure these kids" or else, the else being her job. Jan knows she needs to cure herself while she's at it.The cure may be the Wednesday Club, except that every time it meets, one of its six members either flies away as a pterodactyl, hides behind the tightened strings of his hoody, continues to suck her slick thumb, steals a watch just for the heck of it, or just plain disappears. An irate parent, a scared principal, and Jan's inability to keep her mouth shut bring Jan's job to an abrupt end.However, a couple of good girl friends, a talented lover, a dog, the return of a son, and a belief in her own vision for messed up little kids keep Jan moving through the chaos, hope on the horizon.

The time is 1970; the place is the postwar housing development, the small bungalows built for returning veterans and for shipyard workers. F0r first time in their lives, families had some money. They can afford a new house, two bedrooms, one bath, yards big enough to build a garage in. They begin again, this time without war. The neighborhood fills with working husbands and stay-at-home wives who have time to make friends over morning coffee and play tennis in the local park. The future looks good. But wars continue, not THAT war, but the one in Korea, then Vietnam, then the Middle East. When the first settlers move on, their old homes fill with new surges of veterans' families glad to have chances to begin again. Eleanor, white, meets her new neighbor, Patsy, black, through a break in the twenty year-old overgrown laurel hedge between their houses, planted by Eleanor's husband when they first moved in, . Different wars, different colors, different ages, similar struggles. Their lives entangle, like the limbs of the hedge between them. They have coffee, trim the hedge, begin a friendship that clears the path for hope and trust between the two women. Together they learn to deal with the unlucky hands thev have been dealt: war-scarred husbands, handicapped children, uncertain futures. When tragedy strikes, will they find solace in knowing they are sisters bound by blood?