Review: A Body at Rest

A Body at Rest, by Susan Petrone

When the most drunken guy at the table put his hand on my rear end and made a rather ungentlemanly proposition, I didn't slap him. I quoted Shakespeare.

"Drink provokes the desire but takes away the performance," I said. The unwanted hand was still on my rear, but you could see that he was making an honest effort to understand what he'd just heard. "Macbeth. Act two, scene three," I added, although I knew the attribution wouldn't make a difference.

A Body at Rest, by Susan Petrone

Pretty darned good start to a novel, wouldn't you say? It shouldn't be a surprise, though, considering this debut novel by Susan Petrone was a 2008 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award semi-finalist.

So here's the basics: best friends and roommates, Martha and Nina are twenty-something cocktail waitresses, aimlessly drifting through life. They drink too much, they smoke too much, they migrate from man to man. Well read and well educated, they just need to find direction.

And then on an impetuous road trip the unexplainable, the remarkable, the improbable happens. An impromtu visit to a mysterious tattoo parlor changes Martha and Nina forever.

Literally.

The girls begin to slowly turn into their favorite literary characters. Physically and mentally, Martha begins to morph into the imperious and proper Emma Woodhouse while Nina (the poor girl) slowly turns into the knight-errant, Don Quixote.

Ol' Don and his sidekick, Sancho

What follows is both hysterical and heart-breaking as each of the girls must now follow her new destiny.

Petrone writes sharp, literary-minded dialogue and the plot moves along at a pretty darned good clip. Once the characters (and the reader, for that matter) wrap their minds around what it really going on, the literary references take on a new importance and it becomes a fun challenge to see where Petrone is going with all this.

A Reader's Respite has always enjoyed novels invoking literary classics. For those of you who are drawn to Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next series, this novel will also take you on a literary romp you won't soon forget.

dear Emma Woodhouse

You'll have to suspend belief for this one, but that is half the fun. Who we are, where we're heading and how to find our destiny is the other half. Enjoy!



If you'd like to read some of Susan Petrone's short stories, visit her website!



Title: A Body at Rest
Author: Susan Petrone
ISBN-13: 978-0982060919
268 pages
Publisher: Drinian Press
Date: January 25, 2009



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