When ninety-year-old Bubbles receives a letter from Mexico City asking her to pick up her mother’s ashes, lost there seventy years earlier and only now surfacing, she hatches a plan. A woman with a mission, Bubbles convinces her hippie daughter Feather to accompany her on the quest. Both women have recently shed husbands and have a secondary agenda: they’d like a little action. And they get it.
Alternating narratives weave together Feather and Bubbles’ odyssey. The two women travel south from Canada to Mexico where Bubbles’ long-dead mother, grandmother, and grandfather turn up, enlivening the narrative with their hilarious antics.
In Mexico, where reality and magic co-exist, Feather gets a new sense of her mother, and Bubbles’ quest for her mother’s ashes—and a new man—increases her zest for life. Unlike most women her age, fun-loving Bubbles takes risks, believing she’s immortal. She doesn’t hold back in any way, eating heartily and lusting after strangers, exulting in her youthful spirit.
Readers will believe they’ve found the fountain of youth themselves in this character. At ninety, Bubbles comes into her own, coming to age, proving it’s never too late to fulfill one’s dreams.
Available on Amazon.
My Review
I chose to review this audiobook after receiving a free copy. All opinions in this review are my own and completely unbiased.
While listening to the first quarter or so of Fling, I wondered how I was going to get through the whole thing. The more I listened to it, though, the more it grew on me. Not only did Feather and Bubbles make things interesting, but some strange things were happening and they didn’t seem to think anything of it!
The characters in Fling! are compelling. Bubbles is 90 years old and is quirky. Her daughter, Feather, is in her fifties and has always been unconventional. The two of them taking a trip to Mexico makes for an interesting story, especially once they get the ashes of Bubbles’ mother who died many years ago. When Bubbles’ mother, Heather, and her grandparents show up in the flesh, Bubbles and Feather think nothing of it.
Feather, Bubbles, and Heather take turns thinking about the past. It got a bit confusing for me at times because I was listening to the audiobook and I couldn’t just flip back a couple pages to see who was talking at the time. They all did have interesting experiences in their pasts.
The narrator, Anna Crowe, did a good job narrating. Her voice was clear and pleasant.
I definitely recommend Fling! It starts out slow but it end up being a good, different story.
About the Author
A Canadian by birth, a high school dropout, and a mother at 17, in my early years, I supported myself as a stock girl in the Hudson’s Bay Company, as a long distance operator for the former Alberta Government Telephones, and as a secretary (Bechtel Corp sponsored me into the States). I also was a cocktail waitress at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco, briefly broke into the male-dominated world of the docks as a longshoreman (I was the first woman to work on the SF docks and almost got my legs broken), founded and managed a homeless shelter in Marin County, co-created THE STORY SHOPPE, a weekly radio program for children that aired on KTIM in Marin County, CA, and eventually earned two Master’s degrees (one in Creative writing and one in the Humanities). I have published reviews, interviews, short fiction, poetry, travel pieces, essays, and memoir in over 150 American and Canadian venues. Bone Songs, another novel, will be published in 2017. Freefall: A Divine Comedy will be released in 2018. My poetry collection All This was published in 2011. I also taught writing at the University of San Francisco for over 30 years, and I blog at https://lilyionamackenzie.wordpress.com.
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