Playing House

Somewhere between single girl Bridget Jones and working mother Kate Reddy is Frannie MacKenzie -- baffled, beleaguered and undeniably pregnant. The one thought blazing through Frannie’s formerly trendy, savvy, sharp-tongued New York brain is that she wants to keep this baby -- despite her ultra-small apartment and not being completely sure how to spell the father’s name. Being pregnant is so out of character: how will she break it to her boss, her mother, let alone the father, Calvin Puddie (or is it Pudhey)? Frannie’s problems multiply as she dives headlong into one hilarious complication after another: from being banned from the U.S. and marooned in Toronto, to actually falling in love with her baby’s father. “You don’t find the one, do you?” Frannie muses. “The best one, the Perfect One. You just keep running like Wil E. Coyote, until all of a sudden you’re off the cliff. You fall into your life with the man who is running beside you.” In Playing House, Patricia Pearson has written a witty, heart-touching look at falling by accident into life’s most profound commitment. She deftly captures the self-doubt, messy bodily fluids and inconceivable love that accompany being a mother, and the trepidation and joy with which two people step across the threshold of parenthood and into a realm that is at once alien and completely right. From the Hardcover edition.