Claire Cooke (Must Love Dogs) has built a brand writing light-hearted women's fiction blending kernels of the absurd and comedic in compulsively readable combinations. In Time Flies, she delivers again with the story of Melanie, a middle-aged (and recently divorced) metal sculptor with a highway driving phobia who is goaded by an old friend to attend their high school reunion in Massachusetts.
Melanie, who had uprooted herself and her two sons to accommodate her husband's job years before, has no desire to leave suburban Atlanta and revisit the past. She is content to stay home and literally cut up her king-size marital bed with a chainsaw in order to harvest the springs inside for a new artistic creation. "I'm not famous, I didn't turn into a knockout, my husband left me," she tells her relentless friend. But when an old high school flame, Finn Miller, e-mails to ask if Melanie will be attending the reunion, their flirtatious correspondence--and the fact that Melanie doesn't exactly remember him--is enough to pique her interest and change her mind.
Hilarious potholes abound on the way to memory lane as Melanie journeys to Massachusetts, where she faces her fears while reconnecting with old friends dealing with their own life challenges. The pièce de résistance, however, is the reunion itself, as past and present riotously collide and give birth to an ending as heartfelt as it is hopeful. --Kathleen Gerard, blogger at Reading Between the Lines