What's Come Over You?

What's Come Over You?, Marian Thurm, Delphinium Books, 2001

This group of stories looks at the trials and tribulations of contemporary daily life from a surprising variety of perspectives.

A male Rabbi is shocked when his wife announces to the congregation, during services, that they are splitting up, something that is news to him. A man is depressed because his ex-girlfriend (they had been "thick as thieves" for the previous ten years) is marrying someone else. A single mother and her eleven-year-old daughter are in Florida visiting the woman's mother and stepfather. He has Parkinson's Disease and she thinks that spending her time and money on cosmetics to hold back the ravages of time is more important than things like housekeeping.

A suddenly-divorced man with a seven-year-old daughter finds a female college student in his building making extra money by sending long-overdue thank you notes and weekly letters to the parents. His mother is very happy at the news that he is taking a cooking class and has a girlfriend, things the college student decided to add to give him a "life." A husband-and-wife house cleaning team, with a very strange nine-year-old daughter named Princess, has a major argument while cleaning a woman's apartment. A Jewish woman, whose husband found out that she was cheating on him, is served with divorce papers on the day of her grandfather's funeral. Two people in New York City get married, but neither one wants to give up their apartment to move in with the other, so they have a sort-of long distance marriage.

I was really impressed with these stories. Thurm does a first-rate job with a variety of different narrators, with the dialogue and the poignant humor. These aren't your average tales of modern-day life, they're much better than that.