A Little Bit Ruined: A Novel - Hardcover

9781593761455: A Little Bit Ruined: A Novel
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It’s been seven years, and Eleanor Rushing is still waiting for Maxim Walters, the love of her life, to leave his wife and move into her rambling mansion on St. Charles Avenue. But when she meets Dr. Richard Kimball tall, dark, handsome, and a plastic surgeon her life takes on a whole new direction. Smitten, she decides to go under his knife to alter her looks, and her life. But the summer of 2005 has other plans in store and Hurricane Katrina interrupts Eleanor’s transformation.
As the water rises, self-absorbed Eleanor, thinking only skin deep, floats on the surface of the disaster. She and her longtime housekeeper Naomi wade through the flooded streets of New Orleans, and wind up in Houston along with Dr. Kimball, who gives Eleanor more plastic surgery. This time the result is hideous. Eleanor returns to New Orleans with a body as wrecked as the city and neither will ever be the same. 
In this tragicomic novel, Patty Friedmann deftly exposes the damaged and tenuously intact faces of New Orleans. Friedmann helps us to understand that transformation is probably the most difficult image to process especially when change has been wrought by someone or something beyond our control.

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From Publishers Weekly:
In this uneven sequel to Eleanor Rushing (1995), Eleanor is as entertaining as ever—her delusions about the intentions of her friends and acquaintances are painful and endearing—but is perhaps the wrong narrator to drop into post-Katrina New Orleans. Born and bred in the Crescent City, Eleanor is still waiting to be united with the married Maxim Walters and clinging to the belief that her parents died in a plane crash (and not in the car crash that left her face scarred), but she soon abandons her devotion to Maxim to pursue physical perfection ("z-plasty" on her face, breast augmentation, a fateful and ill-considered liposuction) and the sexy plastic surgeon, Dr. Ricky Kimball, whom she meets at a fund-raiser. Their love affair, however, lacks the intensity of her earlier, deranged one-sided fixation on Maxim. When Hurricane Katrina hits, the novel arrives at its emotional core: Eleanor is intent on riding out the storm, but she and a few other holdouts (including her housekeeper and confidant, Naomi) are forced to evacuate as the city floods. Eleanor's bittersweet homecoming lacks resonance, and though she is undeniably damaged, her self-inflicted ruin isn't the right metaphor for a demolished city. (Apr.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist:
This sequel to Eleanor Rushing (2000) finds our eponymous heroine once again deluded by her fixation on a man, in this case the unfortunately named Dr. Richard Kimball, a shady plastic surgeon. After undergoing a disastrous breast-implant operation (she wakes up during surgery), Eleanor refuses to listen to the advice of her friends, including her longtime black housekeeper, the hilarious Naomi. Instead, she schedules even more extensive cosmetic surgery, but her elaborate plans are deterred by the arrival of Hurricane Katrina. Nothing can persuade her to leave her beloved New Orleans, although she insists on moving into Naomi's crowded rental house to ride out the storm, and the two eventually decamp to Houston as the floodwaters rise. Although the novel's opening scenes are slow and somewhat fragmented in tone, the author hits her stride as her pampered, endearing, pain-in-the-butt heroine is forced to deal with overwhelming circumstances. Eleanor's loopy conversations with Naomi are the comic highlight of a novel that is also bittersweet in its depiction of the damaged Eleanor and her wrecked hometown. Joanne Wilkinson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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  • PublisherCounterpoint
  • Publication date2007
  • ISBN 10 1593761457
  • ISBN 13 9781593761455
  • BindingHardcover
  • Number of pages304
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