My wife just finished reading the brand new, out-of-the-box Meghan Daum book, The Quality of Life Report. (I really enjoyed her previous book, My Misspent Youth, but that was then, when I was younger.) Here is here what she had to say about the new book, which is to be released on May 8, 2003.
“Meghan Daum’s The Quality of Life Report will resonate for anyone who lives in New York City and dreams of greener pastures. Lucinda Trout, a 29-year-old lifestyles televison reporter with an egomanical boss, is fed up with eating tri-colored take-out pasta and living in a closet-sized studio apartment. She seizes an opportunity to move to Prairie City, a town located in an unidentified Midwestern state, imagining that life will be more relaxed and simpler, and where she will be able to broadcast her The Quality of Life Report to New York audiences. The denizens of the town are as diverse as they are down-to-earth and Lucinda quickly adapts, albeit with a New Yorker’s sense of slight superiority. In spite of her warm welcome, however, she learns very quickly that she has not solved her problems but only exchanged them for a set of more complex ones, involving Mason, the boyfriend with a serious addiction and three children by different mothers, the coldest winter the area has seen in twenty years, a freezing farmhouse that is more isolated than idyllic, and a dwindling savings account. Although the circumstances are dire, Daum doesn’t make us feel sorry for Lucinda. We like Lucinda because she meets her obstacles not so much with pluck, but with a self-deprecation and cynicism that ultimately result in an emerging self-awareness. She wins out in the end, but not without a cost. There is a lot of humor in the writing, particularly in the portrayals of the local characters whom Daum gently pokes fun at, but doesn’t satirize. The novel is highly readable, and despite the rambling ending, its ruminations on life’s changes and challenges are as thought-provoking as they are witty.”