Nesting: Tales of Love, Life, and Real Estate - Hardcover

Lois Wyse has published more than sixty books, including Women Make the Best Friends and the New York Times best-seller Funny, You Don't Look Like a Grandmother. She has been a long-time contributing editor at Good Housekeeping and writes a syndicated weekly advice column called "Wyse Words," which appears in newspapers across the country and on the Internet. The president and co-founder of Wyse Advertising, she lives in New York City and East Hampton, New York.

A collection of vignettes, essays, and poetry organized around a central theme: Home is where the schmaltz is. Syndicated advice columnist Wyse, author of books of both fiction and nonfiction (Seconds, 1990, etc.), shamelessly crosses the thin line between real sentiment and crass sentimentality in prose so squishy it makes Hallmark read like Mamet. As she examines the radical notion that a house is more than a building, she not only tells a few of her own tales, but also introduces us to a cast of truly unbelievable characters, all of whom seem to reside in that shadowy no-man's-land between fact and fiction. In ``Ghost in the Attic,'' a spirit who doesn't seem to share their tastes in interior design haunts Frank and Mimi, a young couple renovating his deceased grandmother's house. Armed with the family Bible, Mimi confronts grandma's ghost: ``You were just worried because you didn't know who was messing around with your house. . . . We're all family. . . . And now I'm going to light this candle so you can find your way wherever it is you want to go.'' At that very moment, her friend reports, a ``white light'' made its way down the garden path. In ``The Music of My Heart,'' a young woman, whose environmentally minded husband died shortly after they moved into a cabin together, remains there, listening to the bells he had hung on the trees. ``It is the music of my heart,'' she whispers, ``and it reminds me there is still work we must do to save our planet.'' When Carter, a fastidious architect finally builds ``The Most Beautiful House in the World,'' Maude, his proudly plain wife, refuses to live there with him. Instead, they move right back to their old house., ``a place where a woman could make meatloaf every night of the week.'' Ultimately, it takes a strong stomachand a taste for treacleto appreciate what Wyse has cooked up in this book. (color illustrations, not seen) (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.