The Bad Mother's Handbook/ Swallowing Grandma

3.5/5 ( ratings)

Omnibus edition of Kate Long's bestselling books The Bad Mother's Handbook, and Swallowing Grandma.

The Bad Mother's Handbook:

Three independent, prickly women living together in ex-Council housing sort out life and love in this funny, touching and utterly winning debut, a U.K. bestseller. Not only has 17-year-old Charlotte just gotten dumped by her pretty-boy lover, she's also discovered that she's pregnant. It's like history repeating itself, considering that her mom, Karen, had her when she was 16. Karen's going to kill her, Charlotte thinks, and she's half right: Karen's so mad at her smart, independent daughter for ruining her chance for college that she could just about hit her on the head with a skillet. Then there's Nan—Karen's aging, batty adoptive mother, who burns important mail in the toaster and always seems to need a change of her colostomy bag—whom both Charlotte and Karen love and want to strangle. Long tells the story of Charlotte's pregnancy, Karen's search for her birth mother and Nan's tough past through shifting first-person sections , moving wittily and gracefully toward an ending that's happily realistic. Good secondary characters—Karen's lazy ex, Steve; Charlotte's sweet would-be love, Daniel—round out a lovable cast in this story about growing up at 17, facing life head-on at 33 and letting go at 81.

Swallowing Grandma:

Katherine Millar is eighteen and desperate to be less fat, less swotty and to have cooler friends. But most of all, she wishes she had two parents, instead of one grandma, Poll. Poll is pushing seventy, half blind and utterly poisonous. She has looked after Katherine since she was a baby, when her father was killed in a car crash and her mother vanished. Poll's ambition is for things to stay exactly the same for ever, and for Katherine never to leave their pit village of Bank Top. Katherine has other ideas, and she can feel change is coming; the omens are all around her. In the meantime, she cleans up after Poll, revises for her exams, watches daytime television and surfs the net at the library trying to find out how to be bulimic. What she doesn't quite realize yet is that life won't always wait for you to catch up with it. "Swallowing Grandma" is a perceptive, vivid and painfully funny novel about the ties of love and loathing, and the ways in which our versions of the past can thwart our visions for the future. In Katherine and Poll, Kate Long has created two unforgettable characters locked in an epic battle over whose side of the story will prevail.