Ex-Cottagers In Love

by J.M. Kearns

Dave Moore, 41, is an ex-pat Canadian who is doing just great at all the things he never wanted to do, like living in L.A. and slaving at a giant law firm, while his creative dream nears its expiration date. That?s when he falls hard for a beautiful co-worker named Maggie, an impish, edgy goddess who sees right into his soul.

So he takes her to the beloved summer cottage of his Canadian youth. Well, not quite. That cottage was sold... but hey, you can see it from the rental place. Which won?t stop Dave from trying to summon the past; but will city girl Maggie, beleaguered by her fear of chamberpots and the natural world, desert him in his quest?

As the story returns to L.A., events close in on Dave. Besieged by his increasingly unbearable day-job and by unresolved issues with his ailing father, he is forced to make a momentous is Maggie the destroyer of his dreams, or is she his only hope?

A brilliant, darkly comic novel about a middle-aged man at a crossroads, ex-Cottagers in Love takes the reader on an unforgettable journey from the playful and romantic to deeper, sadder but ultimately more luminous places.

Praise for ex-Cottagers in

"Kearns knows how to craft an evocative passage...the prose sings."
-Danielle Groen, The Globe and Mail

"Will do you proud...We checked with Kearns` you are allowed to be a current cottager and read his darkly humorous life-, love- and career-crisis novel, ex-Cottagers in Love. You are also allowed to read it if you are not a cottager or not in love. Did we mention that it`s set in cottage country?" -The Toronto Star

"Ex-Cottagers in Love is irresistible. The type of post-modern LadLit that is seldom celebrated as sharply as it should be... He?s the real deal."
- Linda L. Richards, January Magazine

380 pages, Paperback

First published May 30, 2008

About the author

J.M. Kearns, PhD, is the best-selling author of a novel and four non-fiction books. He currently teaches at Rowan University. He brings to relationship books such as Why Mr. Right Can’t Find You the unusual combination of a philosopher’s analytical mind and a novelist’s insight into emotions. His books have been published in Canada and the U.S., the UK, Australia, China, and France and featured on Oprah & Friends and in Glamour, Cosmopolitan-UK, Maclean’s, The Toronto Star, and many other media. His novel The Deep End is about to be published in the United States. J.M. Kearns now lives in Cape May, New Jersey with his partner Debra.

Reviews

[Sandra]

This is a first novel by an already best-selling author of non-fiction and it is an enjoyable one.
Dave Moore, 40, is frustrated by the limits of his job as a paralegal at an L.A. firm and wonders whether his beautiful and inciteful new girlfriend will be the end of his dream to write and record music or his best hope for the future. He takes her home to Canada to meet his family who've rented a cottage in the Muskoka region of Ontario. In fact, they spent all their summers in the family cottage that is now sold and everyone regrets the loss, no one more than his 13 year old nephew George and Dave himself who calls the island setting "the place he loved most in the world". Maggie's not an outdoors sort of woman, she doesn't understand their deep attachment to the memories of the old place and things do not go perfectly for the new couple, though Maggie does her best to make friends with everyone.
Back in L.A. he has major decisions to make about his job and his future with Maggie when his father in Canada has a stroke and adds to his worries. Darkly humorous, the story follows both the lighter moments and the sadder ones for Dave, and in a somewhat parallell story, young George and his grandfather back home. The story is more serious than the title first suggested to me and I'm glad of it. I liked these characters and hope that Kearns writes more fiction because he does it well.


J.M.Kearns has also written:

Why Mr. Right Can't Find You: The Surprising Answers that Will Change Your Life (January 2008)

Better Love Next Time: How the Relationship that Didn't Last Can Guide You to the One that Will (January 2009)



my book blog:

http://freshinkbooks.blogspot.com/

[Kane Faucher]

The reader will follow Dave Moore, an ex-pat Canadian working as a paralegal in a law firm in LA rather than pursuing his youthful dream of becoming a songwriter. Dave is a fortysomething experiencing a kind of midlife crisis, attempting to balance a new, complicated and tentative romance with his sudden retrospective longing for Canadian cottage country. Dave Moore's mercurial romance with Maggie Taylor, another paralegal at the firm, is fraught with frequent misunderstandings and bouts of insensitivity. he story alternates its perspective between Dave and his early adolescent nephew, George, who battles the depressive funk of puberty's trials in a small Ontario town by eschewing social popularity for a more honest enjoyment of two “misfit” friends. But, on the whole, the events of the story mostly hinge on the cause of the extended Moore clan's denouement: the hasty selling of the beloved family cottage in the Muskokas.
The story gains surprising tread as Kearns deftly weaves the lives of the characters around various circumstantial pivots. The dialogue can be a bit stiffly wooden in parts, idling, over-explaining, and not always focused. However, peppered in parts by some refreshing observations, it keeps true to its core of sentimentality. Although the story does start off rather weakly, Kearns is able to turn it around to make this story more than just a referential nod to Canadiana, intertwining the lives of characters that sparkle with an honest humanity. And for any who in the balmy summer months feel a nostalgic connection with what cottage life means in Canada, this novel may be good companionable reading.