"Jane met Duncan less than a month after she moved to Boyle City. She had locked herself out of her house and had had to ask a neighbor to call a locksmith. She was sitting on her front steps in the early twilight wearing her pajamas - she taught second grade and it was Pajama Day - Nehru Duncan drove up in a rust-spotted white van.”
I’m Betty Martin with "Martin’s Must Reads" and those are the opening lines to Katherine Heiny’s fun novel Early Morning Riser. Jane falls in love with Duncan early in 2002 but then can’t deal with meeting all his old girlfriends.
Three years later, on the day she is about to marry another man, she sends her mother to drive special guest, Mrs. Jellico, home. When they have a fatal accident and Mrs. Jellico dies, Jane can’t bear to go on with the wedding. She feels responsible and so takes on the care of Jimmy, Mrs. Jellico’s developmentally slow adult son.
Soon thereafter Jane and Duncan reconnect and begin a family with Jimmy. Over the next seventeen years, you come to know and love some very quirky characters... Aggie, Duncan’s first wife and her crazy husband Gary, Mr. Robicheaux, the other second grade teacher who has a lifetime membership to Hooters’s, and the music teacher, Jane’s best friend Frieda, who never goes anywhere without her mandolin.
Frieda’s husband, Mr. Hutchinson, once asked Jane if, “she had heard rumors that the city water supply was contaminated with wild boar excrement.” This is a wonderful story of small town living where people accept one another for who they are.
If you’re looking for a novel that is, as the jacket says, “alternately bittersweet and laugh-out- loud funny, then you must read Early Morning Riser by Katherine Heiny.
