In the past year of Dash Bateman's life her mother died suddenly and her daughter left for college. Now she and her husband are on their own to recraft new lives for themselves and while Dash might take this to an extreme there's nothing out of the ordinary that she goes through in this story.
One night at the same old boring, college faculty party Dash sees her husband standing in the same place all night, talking to the same people, while she is expected to mingle and listen to the politics of his office. It's not long before Dash decides that if Andrew doesn't care she won't either. Then when they arrive home they find a half-frozen puppy on their front porch. Dash instantly takes it to heart, literally, and warms the puppy with her body as Andrew calls their vet for instructions but doesn't hesitate to remind Dash that he's allergic to dogs so there's no question about keeping the thing. Dash doesn't think there's a question either. With the puppy thawing against her skin and Andrew sneezing Dash leaves and drives to their country cabin.
Because Mad Dash is women's fiction and not just a romance novel we see more of Dash's world than just how she relates to the man in her life. Dash hires a new assistant who reminds her of herself when she was a young photography student which both confuses and clarifies for her what her life choices were about. Her best friend is recently divorced and living a new life on her own and she sometimes wonders what it would be like to have that kind of freedom, too.. As Dash works through her feels about what she wants out of life her conversations with her friends provide a sounding board for Dash - as women do for each other - but also allow Dash to really explore her feelings and her needs.
The crux of the story and of Dash's decision to leave her husband is really about trying to re-establish for herself just who she is. She feels she's no longer her mother's daughter now that her mother's dead and she's beginning to fear that she'll no longer be her daughter's mother for long as her daughter moves toward her own life. And now she's deciding whether she wants to remain her husband's wife and if she isn't what this would mean. She wonders if she's three, or one, or two and during a point of introspection she mentions that she has a dream where she sees a single woman striding confidently down the street. Alone. Very telling.
Lest you think that Mad Dash is going to leave you thinking that it's the puppy's fault or that this was destined to happen once the daughter left for school make no mistake in thinking that the book is that two-dimensional. We see this relationship from both Andrew and Dash's perspective. Their present. Their past. What brought them together and how they deal with whether they'll choose to get back together.
With some women's fiction the ending comes likes a thud, and as Susan Elizabeth Phillips mentioned on the back cover blurb of my copy, and 'you race to take an antidepressant'. There are no worries about that with this book. While there might have been moments when the characters had hard choices to make, in the end those choices pay off for Dash, Andrew, and the readers.
My reasons for picking up this book at first were varied. I've never read anything by Patricia Gaffney but I found it interesting that cover blurbs were given by Nora Roberts, Janet Evanovich, Jenny Crusie, and Susan Elizabeth Phillips. I had to know what kind of author wrote books that appealed to women as diverse as these. I don't know the answer but I'm definitely intrigued and I enjoyed the book.
Do you pick up books based on the cover blurbs? Have you been surprised?
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