Our Lady of the Prairie

A sharp and bitingly funny novel about a professor whose calm-ish midwestern life gives way to a vortex of crisesand her attempts to salvage the pieces without going to pieces herselfIn the space of a few torrid months on the Iowa prairie, Phillipa Maakestadlong-married theater professor and mother of an unstable daughtergrapples 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 Ginnys 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 Nissens new novel is sexy, smart, and razor-sharpa freight train barreling through the heart of the land and the land of the heart.