Book Review: Fabulous in Flats by Mary T Wagner

Fabulous in Flats

By Mary T Wagner

iUniverse

c. May 2011

ISBN: 978-1-4620-1531-3 (pbk) 14.95

ISBN: 978-1-4620-1532-0 (ebk) 6.00

Mary’s right, there’s nothing like the sound of heels clicking down a polished floor; not even flip-flops across campus , but I honestly fell in love with Mary’s take on life…I wanted to be Mary, or at least go to the Renaissance faire with her and join the sisterhood of selective memory after reading this book. But probably not use power tools with her, though.

Fabulous in Flats, I believe, is Mary’s third collection of essays that began as web site posts. May’s been through a lot of living that includes myriads of work experiences from journalism to waitress to wife and mom to a legal practice to divorce and re-entry to the relationship game and writing.

The essays in Fabulous in Flats flutter around the clean-up after divorce and are liberally themed on cleaning out her garage. “(This was) a good time to sit in the shade, sip a glass of lemonade over ice, and watch the goldfinches alight at the thistle feeders. Instead, I was dismantling pieces of my past on a beastly hot day in an effort to make more sense and order of my present. In other words, I was cleaning out the garage.”

Memories surface as she rediscovers pieces of her life and reinvents herself as an accomplished saw artist, tiger mother, pet owner, gardener, and dessert maker after my own heart. Going through Mary’s garage with her was like ripping off bandages that had lost the ability to hurt. Reading this book was a delightful evening relaxing in somebody else’s angst for a change. I knew she was a sister at heart when I got to “I’ve quit trying to plan anything out in life anymore, opting for the ‘carpe diem’ school of thought on a day-to-day basis.”

After I’d long passed the point of being able to review, I continued to read this entire collection and highly recommend Fabulous in Flats to every empty-nest mom. All women of a certain age will get a kick out of the YouTube dancing queen who poignantly observes that, “at this age, maybe we don’t have to do everything the hard way.”

Available on pring Amazon, eBook and Barnes and Noble and the iUniverse store

Reviewed by Lisa Lickel, LisaLickel.com

The author provided a reader copy for review.