The Past Is Another Country

By Lois Battle

Megan Hanlon is the daughter of a Australian woman and an American soldier. Her parents met when he was in Australia in the 1940s. Theirs was a turbulent marriage and he seemed unable to settle down and support his wife and children. So Megan was sent to live with her aunt and uncle in Australia. Megan's mom was Irish Catholic and so Megan attended a Catholic girls' school.  She was a bit of a rebel, which didn't sit well with some of the nuns.
Her parents divorced and her mother remarried and Megan went back to the USA to live with her mother. Her father made sporadic appearances in their lives but more often than not he was nowhere to be found. Nonetheless, she loved him even as she hated the way he treated her and her brother and mother.
Fast forward about thirty years and Megan is now a movie director. She has come back to Australia for a film festival featuring a film she directed. She has also been nominated for an Academy Award for a documentary she made about runaway teens living on the streets in New York City. It's an important time in her life, a point at which she can achieve her dreams or crash and burn. But going back home to Australia causes a lot of buried issues to be dredged up and dealt with if she is to have some peace and understanding of herself, of her relationships with her ex-husband and an ex-lover and, of course, with her mother and absent father.

Pretty typical entry in the chick-lit genre, featuring three women in their early middle age,  coming to grips with their lives. Megan, the movie director, dealing with her unhappy childhood; Greta, the wife of a successful surgeon, having to face the truth about her marriage, and Joan, a nun, falling in love with a man for the first time in her life. Hearts are broken, relationships are ended, realities are faced and all three make hard choices. But even though typical in its subject matter, it is an engrossing and absorbing story, all the characters quite sympathetic despite their flaws and mistakes and well worth reading. I enjoyed it a lot.

Florabama Ladies' Auxiliary & Sewing Circle

By Lois Battle

Bonnie Duke Cullman lived a life of comfort and privilege. Until her husband revealed that they were facing bankruptcy and that he no longer wished to be married to her. So Bonnie had to leave her cushy lifestyle behind and set out to make a new life for herself.
Fortunately for Bonnie, her daddy, Duke, is a man of influence and connections and, calling in a few favors, got Bonnie a job as a councilor at a small college in Florabama. And her clients are a group of women who lost their jobs at a local mill when the mill suddenly closed.
At first terrified and ill-prepared to reenter the workforce after decades as a well-to-do married woman, Bonnie soon settles into her new job and gets to know some of the women who have turned to her for guidance and advice. There's Hilly, outspoken and fiery, who manages to find a job as a waitress and to fall in love with her new boss.  Ruth, quiet and a bit of a doormat, dreams of being a teacher but fears she is too old and too stupid. There is Ruth's whiny grown daughter who isn't above thievery and abandoning her children. As for Bonnie, she starts out shaky and scared but finds out she is more than capable of standing on her own two feet.

This was an OK read. It was mainly about Bonnie, Ruth and Hilly and not so much about the sewing circle.  The other women are peripheral to the story and their trials and tribulations are only touched on briefly. Also the story just kind of peters out at the end.