Book # 9 of 2012 – Good in a Crisis by Margaret Overton

Book to be released on January 31, 2012.  Pre-order your copy from Amazon or Barnes & Noble.

Goodreads Summary: Honest, hopeful, hilarious—the smartest, most knowing account of a woman and the calamities of midlife since Nora Ephron’s wryly humorous Heartburn.

During the four years of physician Margaret Overton’s acrimonious divorce, she dated widely and indiscriminately, determined to find her soul mate and live happily ever after. But then she discovered she had a brain aneurysm. She discovered it at a particularly awkward moment on a date with one of many Mr. Wrongs.

Good in a Crisis is Overton’s laugh-out-loud funny story of dealing with the most serious of life’s problems: loss of life, loss of love, loss of innocence. It’s about spirituality, self-delusion, even sheer stupidity. It’s written from a physician’s perspective, but it’s not about medicine, per se; it’s about coming of age in adulthood, an effort to help others through the awful events that can cluster in midlife. She does this with laughter and the recognition that you may come out the other end, as Overton did, definitely humbled… and only slightly smarter.

To learn more about the author, please go to the publisher’s site. 

I’m not sure I was the right demographic for this book. At least, I hope I’m not. The author writes about her experiences going through a divorce and going through the dating world and all the hilarity, sadness, hope, and hurt that goes along with that. Then she had so many other things happen to her that it is just amazing that so many shitty things have to happen all at once to one person (I know how that goes). She said “midlife is one big snowballing cluster fuck.” How true that is. However,  as she points out, sometimes you just have to laugh.

Some of that laughter comes from all of the dates that she went on  - one guy who seemed to love green and liked plaid thongs for himself. However, dating wasn’t all laughter for her. There was some crazy and hurt in there too.  There was guy that she dated that would have drove me crazy with saying over and over again “the fact are” or “at the end of the day”. There is a guy in my vanpool exactly like this, and he does drive me crazy.  One thing that I couldn’t help but notice with all of her dating was her fear of being alone. I think she recognized this at some point.

The message I got from this book is that sometimes you have to be patient – patient when trying to figure out what those signs mean; patient when just going through and dealing with life. And you also just have to laugh even when there is so much chaos in your life because otherwise the fragility of life (as she stated life is) would just suck you under. As we all know, this is really hard for most of us to do.

(You can tell a doctor wrote this book since she kept using medical terminology so that got a little annoying. )

I gave this book 4 STARS.

E-Book received from the publisher (Bloomsbury USA) through Netgalley for an honest review.