Smothering

First there was Bridget Jones. Then came the Nannies. Now meet Claire McLeod, a twenty-something American girl living in Portland, Oregon. Claire's got big problems: Her mother's a tyrant, her sister's a lesbian, her father's in Omaha. Claire's peaceful, if dull, existence is shattered when her mother arrives in Portland for an unexpected - and unwelcome visit. Armed with a sharp tongue, a critical eye and enough weekender wear to make anyone nervous, Mom has mysteriously left Dad at home in the mid-west. It's not enough that Claire's job as telephone survey-taker is excruciatingly irritating, and that her boyfriend has dumped her. No, now, embarrassed by her dead-end job and flatlining love life, she must also bear the weight of Mum's critical eagle-eye while trying to close the rift between her mother and her sister (Mum can't understand why Claire's sister insists on being a lesbian), solve the riddle of her missing father, climb a shaky corporate ladder, stalk a cute co-worker in hopes of reviving her love life, reinvent herself, and maybe, just maybe, find a little happiness.
By turns tender and insightful-but always hilariously funny Smothering is a smart, fast, post-modern take on mother-daughter relationships, boyfriend-girlfriend disasters, sisterly devotion and divisions, father-daughter misunderstandings, and the career girl blues, all wrapped up in a page-turner of a novel you can't put down. Claire is a character women will identity with, whatever their age.