Title: Our lady of the prairie
Description: "A sharp and bitingly funny novel about a professor whose calm-ish midwestern life gives way to a vortex of crises--and her attempts to salvage the pieces without going to pieces herself...In the space of a few torrid months on the Iowa prairie, Phillipa Maakestad--long-married theater professor and mother of an unstable daughter--grapples with a life turned upside down. After falling headlong into a passionate affair during a semester spent teaching in Ohio, Phillipa returns home to Iowa for her daughter Ginny's wedding. There, Phillipa must endure (among other things) a wedding-day tornado, a menace of a mother-in-law who may or may not have been a Nazi collaborator, and the tragicomic revenge fantasies of her heretofore docile husband. Naturally, she does what any newly liberated woman would do: she takes a match to her life on the prairie and then steps back to survey the wreckage. Set in the seething political climate of a contentious election,Thisbe Nissen's new novel is sexy, smart, and razor-sharp--a freight train barreling through the heart of the land and the land of the heart"--

After falling headlong into a passionate affair during a semester spent teaching in Ohio, theater professor Phillipa Maakestad returns home to Iowa for her daughter Ginny's wedding. She faces a wedding-day tornado, a menace of a mother-in-law who may or may not have been a Nazi collaborator, and the tragicomic revenge fantasies of her heretofore docile husband. Naturally, she does what any newly liberated woman would do: she takes a match to her life on the prairie and then steps back to survey the wreckage.
Subjects: Women, Families, Adultery, Women college teachers, Weddings, Fiction, Fiction, humorous, College teachers, fiction, Iowa, fiction, Fiction, romance, historical, Self-actualization (Psychology) in women, FICTION / Family Life, FICTION / Contemporary Women, Life change events, FICTION / Literary
Places: Iowa