 Years and years ago I saw a poster which said “Parents, get your revenge. Live long enough to be a worry to your children”. I always liked the sound of that! I think as children we often think of our parents as people who should lead the sort of lives we want them to lead and then, if they do something unexpected, we're totally taken aback.
In Anyone But Him, Cora Corcoran is a fifty-eight year old widow who goes on a cruise with her sister-in-law. The cruise is a birthday gift from one of her daughters, Jin (and her other daughter, Andie, isn't very happy about it because she thinks that Jin is flaunting her wealth by sending their mother on the cruise). It causes a certain amount of tension between the sisters, neither of whom think the other has a very satisfactory lifestyle; but when Cora arrives back from the cruise with a toy-boy in tow they are both united in horror. They can't believe that Jack is all he seems and they think that Cora has lost her marbles. So they immediately start interfering. But Jin and Andie also have issues in their own lives and with their own relationships which bubble up as a result of meddling in Cora's.
So the book is about the expectations we have about the lives of other people in our families and how we see our own expectations differently. It's about thinking we know best for other people even when we're making a mess of our own lives. And it's also about our preconceptions.
I hope you enjoy it!
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