| Customer Reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars It Would Make A Terrific Movie!, March 26, 2011
This review is from: The Everyday Housewife: Murder, Drugs, and Ironing (Paperback) I'm an avid reader and I enjoy reading several genres- my favorites being crime fiction and horror. The Everyday Housewife: Murder, Drugs, and Ironing, written by Bryan Foreman, is a dark comedy and it truly succeeds as such. Yet, it also combines elements of other genres, namely crime, suspense, horror... and is unlike any novel I have ever read. I've never read anything so tragic and yet so funny in the very same scene... and often in the very same sentence. He has such a wonderful way with words and he is an amazing storyteller.
I'm not going to bother describing the plot to you as other reviewers have done. I'll just say that here you get two stories in one... the story of "Everyday Housewife" Katharine Beaumont, who goes on a thrilling journey of self-discovery, and the story of her heroine and alter-ego, Kitty Everhart, as Katharine continues to write her novel throughout her own adventure. The two stories are quite different from each other and set in different time frames, yet quite similar, especially in the way the two heroines deal with their situations. Katharine and Kitty become one and the same by the novel's end.
I think The Everyday Housewife would make a terrific movie, with Meryl Streep or Sissy Spacek playing the dual roles. I realize that those two actresses are probably way too old for the part. But, they would've been perfect for it twenty or thirty years ago. In fact, I imagined Sissy Spacek as Katharine while I was reading. Okay, how 'bout Nicole Kidman or Naomi Watts? And, how 'bout Jada Pinkett-Smith as Bree Withers, another important character in the novel who becomes Katharine's best friend in the lonely streets of Manhattan? It is the character of Bree Withers that makes the story so tragic.
Katharine also strikes up a romance with a big, burly bartender named Big Joe Milano who lets her in on a little secret from the very beginning because he's honest, despite all of his other flaws. The two are an unlikely pair, but their scenes together and the dialogue between them are so amusing and so real that I didn't want to see their relationship come to an end, though it must.
Bryan Foreman is such a brilliant writer that I was shocked to discover that he has written just one other book and that he has lived in Oklahoma City his whole life, like his main character. He seems to know the world around him so well- and New Yorkers in particular. I hope he's busy working on another character-driven story, because I can't wait to read it.
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