Review: Leave It To Beaver / The Breakfast Club / Fatal Attraction
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 06 13, 2012
When Kate Willoughby's family moves into eight-year-old Luke Koslov's neighborhood, his life changes forever.  Kate's domination of Luke begins immediately as she takes charge of the neighborhood children and directs their play. With her strong personality, manipulative ways, and vindictive nature, she claims Luke as her own and controls his life through high school and college and beyond. Although Luke feels occasional misgivings and uneasiness during those years, he rarely questions his life. But then .... Since I don't want to give spoilers in my review, I'll just say that Luke has a change of heart.Kate is reminiscent of Glenn Close's character in "Fatal Attraction", though not quite that extreme. (In fact, that movie is mentioned in the book.) She is self-centered, driven, and willing to use almost any means to get what she wants. Even in high school, she is one of those people you wouldn't want to cross. Her beauty and strong personality assure her popularity, though that may have been more from fear than her classmates' genuine fondness for her.Following the lives of Luke and Kate from the 1950s to present time, Perigee Moon gives an accurate and often entertaining look at the lifestyles, beliefs, and social mores of those decades. Luke is a sympathetic character--a good guy who basically just goes along with whatever comes his way. Introspective, thoughtful, he's easy prey for Kate. Although I often wished he would "man up" and take charge of his life, the author presented Luke's reasonable, well-thought-out logic for why he should go along with Kate's plans in a believable way. Kate's manipulation of Luke is heart-breaking; she's easy to hate.All through the book, Lynn Schneider's sense of humor shines through. One of my favorite scenes takes place in Luke's office and involves the use of buzzwords and catch phrases by the Earnest Young Men (EYM) in his office. After hearing "on the same page", "having said that", and "paradigm shift" one too many times, Luke makes up his own phrase and uses it, just to see if he can get the EYM's to adopt it. That scene and the ones that follow have a "Take This Job and Shove It" feel that almost everyone has experienced at least once.I highly recommend this enthralling and entertaining book. Not only is it beautifully written, the book's formatting on my Kindle was flawless, leaving me free to enjoy the author's words. I saw no typos, misuse of words, or grammatical errors, for which I'm grateful.