The timing was excellent…Just as was craving more attention, along came Laura Lee French, dorm mother without a day job, single, child-less, and ultimately famous within our gates.” So explains Frederica Hatch, the beguiling narrator of My Latest Grievance. Chafing under the care of “the most annoyingly evenhanded parental team in the history of civliza-tion,” Frederica is starting to feel that her life is stiflingly snug.

Into this cozy world comes Laura Lee, a wannabe former Rockette and the new dorm mother at the college where Frederica's parents teach. But this seem-ingly routine faculty hire turns into a catalyst for havoc and hilarity, for it hap-pens that Miss French-in the distant past-was married to none other than Frederica's earnest and distinctly unglamorous father. The results? Delightful, but also memorable and touching-vintage Elinor Lipman.

 

ELINOR LIPMAN is the author of seven previous novels including The Pursuit of Alice Thrift, The Inn at Lake Devine , Isabel's Bed, and Then She Found Me. Four of her novels are in development as films. Lipman is a columnist for the Boston Globe Magazine. In 2001, she won the New England Book-sellers Award for fiction.