The Summer Without Men

Mia Fredrickson, the wry, vituperative, tragic comic, poet narrator, "has been forced to reexamine her own life. One day, out of the blue, after thirty years of marriage, Mia's husband, a renowned neuroscientist, asks her for a "pause." This abrupt request sends her reeling and lands her in a psychiatric ward. The June following Mia's release from the hospital, she returns to the prairie town of her childhood, where her mother lives in an old people's home. Alone in a rented house, she rages and fumes and bemoans her sorry fate. Slowly, however, she is drawn into the lives of those around her--her mother and her close friends,"the Five Swans," and her young neighbor with two small children and a loud angry husband--and the adolescent girls in her poetry workshop whose scheming and petty cruelty carry a threat all their own.