"Dream-like, sweet, detached romance"

This is a sweet, detached romance between an isolated 28- year-old and an older, self-absorbed man. Written in first- person, present-tense, the book seems to glide along with a dream-like quality, touching and absorbing the lives of these quirky characters who seem to be adrift in life.

Mirabelle works at the glove counter at Neiman Marcus, a counter where hardly anyone shops. She wishes to work at the perfume counter so at least there would be customers to talk to. She is on medication for her depression. You can feel how she balances her soul as she leaves for her empty apartment and equally empty life every evening.

But Mirabelle has a fragile quality about her that attracts an older, wealthy man, and this is their story. Mirabelle and Ray dance around each other, both misinterpreting the nuances of their eccentric and ultimately unworkable romance. While she assumes if he traveled less they would marry, he sees her merely as a filler for the emptiness in his own life while he's in town. He is good to her, but too remote to really make her happy and whole.

The relationship progresses, and it of course changes; finally they both realize what it was they really needed (and got) from each other at the time, how they had pretended it was something else, and what they actually have together.

It is her plain-ness and the common desperation that makes this story so familiar -- the buried loneliness, her desire to be "something', men who play a part but don't, the waiting around for things to happen rather than her ability to decisively move forward. A very intimate look into a common though dysfunctional affair.

Reviewed by Dana Dietrick
Posted May 15, 2002