Late Bloomer

Thank you for your newest and most uproarious novel, Late Bloomer. Thank you for providing me with a book which both tickles and pinches, tugs and shoves, inspires and entertains! It is spring, and love IS in the air, but some girls need a bit more than Hollywood or the best selling romance novels have to offer lately. Real love, as demonstrated in Bloomer, is hard to explain or justify. Prudence was a complex and dynamic girl, quite a bit like myself, who I could both relate to and condemn. Bloomer, with it's quirky characters and delicious storyline, has all of the elements necessary to satisfy both the intellect and the town gossip. Thank you, Ms. Pritchard, for writing such a rare and true tale of love, family, coincidence, and life. I hope to soon see Late Bloomer in a movie theatre for all of America to enjoy! (P.S. Johnny Depp as Ray Chasing Hawk? Please??)

Melissa Pritchard is one of the funniest writers in America, and Late Bloomer is one of the funniest books. Prudence True Parker is an instantly likable heroine and a matchless guide to the many worlds she traverses, from swap-meet, second-rate spiritualism to an unforgettable depiction of a Native American Sun Dance. Pritchard's brilliance is most clear in her ability to move from high-spirited satire to a deeply realized depiction of transcendence, and to carry them both off with perfect and delightful elan.

There is nothing late in the blooming of Melissa Pritchard's Late Bloomer. It flowers with Grand-Canyon-sized hilarity from the moment Prudence True Parker stands clad in glow-in-the-dark pumpkin boxers surveying the dismal contents of her refrigerator and concluding that something in her life is off-kilter. In fact, kilter seems to have given a wide berth to the Arizona community college professor. Prudence is besieged by failures in love, money, and confidence-all rendered with Pritchard's characteristic smart and wicked insights-until Prudence finds rescue by a hero ripped from the covers of romance novels. But wait, what is rescue? Then again, what is romance? What is success? What literature? Late Bloomer plays delightful havoc with such distinctions, pulling a Navajo rug out from under accepted and presumed truths. What are truths, anyway?

This book, like Pritchard's others, is lyrical, rich, and engaging in a hilarious and sultry kind of way. Reading her prose(whether she is describing her widowed mother in Hawaii or an encounter with a romance writer in the bathroom at the library)is equivalent to eating a really good piece of chocolate. One wants to savor the experience, dwell on the details. She'll blow a reader away with imagery, word choice, and humor. Her ability to make the audience laugh while playing around with the romance genre results in a literary novel with poetic punch.

This book kept me up reading, laughing and thinking all night, about love, romance, the older woman/younger man relationship - Late Bloomer is perfect, I-can't-put-this-book-down reading! I have read Pritchard's other books, and it amazes me how versatile and gifted a writer she is. A funny, wickedly fabulous novel!