As promised, here’s a short piece I wrote on Lisa Tucker’s fourth novel, The Cure for Modern Life, for Hawai`i’s ‘Daily Candy’, the email magazine Lei Chic.
Bizarre Love Triangle
April 1, 2008
By Christine Thomas
Lei Chic
It’s all too easy to be fooled, especially when love is involved. But so often you’re the one hoodwinking, making choices you think should be made and ignoring what your heart tells you.
Just like good-girl Amelia who, in Lisa Tucker’s clever fourth novel The Cure for Modern Life, loves Matthew but breaks it off with him because she can’t support his big pharmaceutical company job. Bitter and alone, and living by her principles, she devotes her life to scientific ethics and ruining Matthew’s business. In response, Matt the unscrupulous bad boy does everything to protect his company’s image, even setting up Amelia with his scientist best friend Ben in a ploy to prevent her from derailing his biggest deal.
Despite Amelia’s revenge quest and Matthew’s self-absorption, Tucker’s humorous, perceptive prose tricks you into immediately liking both. And when Matthew’s good side cons him into helping two homeless children one cold Philadelphia night, the resulting involvement sets off a smart, suspenseful plot that brings Amelia, Matthew and Ben into a tangled web of love and friendship, and delivers captivating twists that engender questions about what it really means to do the right thing.
Pity the fool who doesn’t see reading this novel is one of them.
Available at amazon.com and your local bookseller.
Literary Lotus 