The Land of Mango Sunsets

THE LAND OF MANGO SUNSETS is a story that in part revolves around a woman and her relationship with her elderly mother, but it’s mostly about a middle-aged woman who comes to terms with her life, and the relationships that are most important to her.

Miriam Elizabeth Swanson lives in New York. She's divorced, and rents out her apartment to help make ends meet. Her good for nothing husband had run off with a much younger woman and good riddance to him! Miriam's best friend is her gay renter Kevin, who is the only man in her life that she can trust and depend on. At the start of the story, she is trying to find another renter, to replace the one that had recently passed away. After much interviewing, Kevin and Miriam eventually agree on a young woman from Alabama, whom they feel will fit right in.

Miriam's personality is that of a very stuffy southern belle. The reader may assume at first that Miriam is an elderly woman by the way she behaves. Part of the story line has Miriam writing thank you notes obsessively and diligently, and I kept imagining an elderly spinster sitting at her desk. She writes these thank you notes for almost everything, and most of them have to do with the social groups she participates in, groups that at one time held her in high regard. But since the divorce, her standing has fallen. Miriam’s husband had the money and evidently once the money left she was now considered a nobody.

Miriam's heart belongs in the south, in the Low Country. After discovering her new boarder is not as pristine and high class as she had hoped, Miriam goes home to escape and visit her mother, and soon her troubles melt away. However, when the new renter Liz encounters troubles of her own, Miriam brings Liz home with her to recuperate and to get some mothering as well.

While visiting home, Miriam meets her mother's boyfriend, a much younger man named Harrison Ford, of all names! Miriam notices her mother's changed lifestyle, too. She's eating organic, raising her own chicken for eggs, and basically she's a transformed woman. This southern-bred woman is now a hippie, thinks Miriam. Her mother must be crazy or it could be just old age.

With encouragement from her mother and Harrison, Miriam goes out with a man that Harrison was acquainted with, Manny, who brings out the wild side in Miriam, and she even accepts a new nickname, Mellie. Mellie loosens up her hair so to speak, and to the surprise of everyone she becomes a much less stodgy person and a more relaxed woman. However, she actually has her eyes on Harrison, but she knows Harrison is off limits.

Closer to home, Miriam regrets not having a strong relationship with her two sons. She had a falling out with one son due to the awful names he had given to his two children, and the other son Miriam wrote off because he moved in with a woman of color who also happened to be boring, and she wasn't even from this country! But something happens to alter Miriam's view on life. She vows to change. To prove that she's transformed into a new woman, when Miriam's son Charlie announces that he and Priscilla are finally getting married, she gives him the shock of his life by congratulating him and his fiancée, and opens up her arms and heart to both of them. Thus starts their adventure as they plan the wedding, and Miriam hopes that this wedding will be celebrated by the entire family, including her estranged son.

Ultimately, however, THE LAND OF MANGO SUNSETS is about Miriam (Mellie), who starts off as a person that many people find harsh and stuck up and not very fun, and turns into a changed person. Her struggles to unite her family will strike a chord with many people, just as her relationship with her mother will bring out the tissues. I am going to say, without having read all of her books that THE LAND OF MANGO SUNSETS is probably one of her best books yet. As a story told with humor (Miriam’s bird is a riot!), a review of this book cannot fully describe the wonderful journey the reader will take as they start from the first page and end on that last happy, albeit sentimental, paragraph. THE LAND OF MANGO SUNSETS is highly recommended.

May 2008