I went with Sittenfeld, mostly because I've read and loved her previous novels Prep and The Man of My Dreams (never got around to An American Wife, which fictionalized the life of Laura Bush).
Sisterland is set in St. Louis, Missouri. It focuses on a stay-at-home mom who has happily given up her career to stay home with the kids, while her kindly scientist husband provides for the family. Oh, and it’s about psychic twins who can predict earthquakes, and how we are all utterly at the mercy of an indifferent universe. I liked it. My review will be in tomorrow's paper, but Sittenfeld is reading at Powell's tomorrow night, so here's a heads up.
(Susan Choi's My Education is also a really, really great novel; it pulls a lovely bait-and-switch in its early pages by introducing a young grad student who's smitten with her male professor, only to ultimately fall for the professor's wife. As an examination of relationships and aging, and how our expectations of ourselves and others change over the years, I thought it worked really well. Choi's at Powell's next week.)
