01/08

Hallie Palmer knows cards -- she learned poker at the age of seven and left home aged 15 as a teenage card shark. What she doesn't know about is life and love. Luckily, the friends and surrogate family she gathered in the first two novels (Beginner's Luck and Heart's Desire) are going to provide the love, because life just dealt her a bad hand. Her father dies suddenly and her mother can't cope, so Hallie has to drop out of her studies in Cleveland and head home to wrangle her eight younger siblings -- a tall order for any 18-year-old.

A young woman dealing with tragedy may not seem like the most promising premise for a light-hearted coming-of-age novel, but Pedersen pulls it off by refusing to be too solemn about anything life throws at Hallie. Her uncle Lenny (an old-school sea-salt) arrives to help and teaches the younger children some choice language while telling them terrifying tales of his time at sea. Her sister Louise drops out of school and runs away with her boyfriend, but Hallie just resumes the battle she won in Beginner's Luck with the school-attendance officer.

Not that Hallie is a super-hero either, anybody who's ever coped with small children knows that she's going to crack at some point. It doesn't help that her school friends and boyfriend are off having a great time at college. Thankfully her old church-basement poker gang (yes, you read that right) rally around. Pastor Costello practically moves in and the Stockton family (the uber-camp Bernard, his partner Gil, their twin girls, and Bernard's campaigning mother Olivia) support Hallie in every way. In Bernard's case this involves hair-tips and catering.

How does Pedersen keep the story, which is mainly one of Hallie growing up and dealing with loss, ticking over on the comedy-level? It's simple, or at least she makes it look simple. A huge cast of lovable but quirky characters live their lives in unique ways. Hallie's best friend Bernard runs a girl-scout troop as an etiquette and cooking class. I enjoyed when a small girl asked him what was the right age for wedding bells and he replied "It's not like a soufflé. You can't time these things".

Hallie's younger brother Teddy, somewhat of a junior philosopher, helps her mother back to mental equilibrium while Hallie is losing her own balance after losing the ribbon that helps hers distinguish her identical twin brothers. When the town floods a bootlegger's stash of booze washes up, and half the town, including the pastor and police-officer, go fishing for bottles in everything from bathtubs to rowboats.

I could talk about the Halloween mania with eight trick-or-treaters in the house, Olivia's latest dalliance with younger European men, Bernard's use of "mime-time" to silence toddlers, or Gil's production of "Our Town" but I don't want to ruin these charming set-pieces. Thankfully the book as a whole is more than just a collection of outlandish events in short chapters.

Pedersen manages to deal with the subject of grief in a sensitive fashion and coaxes Hallie through a perfect one-night-stand to a resolution of her on-off relationship with Craig. She even manages to throw in some happy endings for other characters in the book which is great as the extended cast is part of the charm of this enjoyable read.

My only quibble is that for the first half of the book each chapter tended to be rounded off a little too neatly with a life observation which reminded me too much of those voice-overs certain TV dramas are fond of these days. As the novel progressed, these were dispensed with, thank goodness. The one fault is wiped out by sassy one-liners, characters that stay in your head long after reading, excellent writing, and pace that many a thriller-writer would envy.

Anyone who enjoys well-written feel-good fiction is going to love Hallie and her extended family. I'd only read one of the previous Hallie books and I think this one stands alone. You won't need to read the others first, just dive in, and avoid Uncle Lenny's giant snakes, and the bootlegger's booze bottles.

Best Bet, the next Hallie Palmer book, and the last in the series, will be out soon. Keep on eye on www.LauraPedersenBooks.com for future books.