The Land of Mango Sunsets by Dorothea Benton Frank

This is another book I just added to my TBR pile since it was on the nest. I started reading it and just wasn't feeling it, so I read Lucky instead. Then I went back to TLOMS and was feeling just so so for a while. I am not sure what happened, but all of a sudden I couldn't put it down. One morning, I just read 200+ pages because I wanted to finish it.

The basic premise is that it is about a woman who lives alone (except for her talkative parrot) in a townhouse in NYC. She rents out the other two sections of the townhouse to her best friend, Kevin, and a man who dies at the beginning of the novel. Her and Kevin have auditions for the free room and wind up renting it to a woman (Liz) who turns out to be having an affair with the husband of one of Miriam's "friends." Miriam is disgusted by this since her husband left her for "the other woman."

I think this may have been the point that the book truly turned around on me. Miriam spills the beans about the affair and Liz winds up getting horribly beaten by the man she was sleeping with. Miriam feels horribly guilty and this starts the gears in motion for her making things right in her life. She fixes the broken relationships she has with her sons, gets over her husband's betrayal, spends important quality time with her mother, and finds love and a more fulfilling life. It, too, was sad in the end (seems to be a trend in the books I have been reading) but it was still uplifting. I really wound up enjoying it. 4 stars