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Growing Out of Trouble
By
Daisy Bennett
Synopsis
"I stood in front of the mirror and surveyed the scene. Things weren’t looking good; in fact, they weren’t looking good at all. There were handles on my love handles and angry red stripes of stretch marks snaked across them and my lower belly. I hadn’t even been able to see them while I was pregnant and smugly commented to anyone who would listen that I had escaped without a single mark, Probably because I haven’t put on too much weight (ha! Who was I trying to kid?).
What a blow in the days after the birth when I was finally reunited with the underside of my stomach, only to find that it had betrayed me and was riddled with purplish rivers of broken collagen unable to withstand the expansion required to house a 7lb baby plus several stone of placenta, amniotic fluid, spicy nik naks and Cadburys Caramel!
To make matters worse, it seemed that, as of last night, I had also become a single mother, and, with a body like this, I thought, perusing the gruesome sight before me, how was that ever going to change? I was a statistic, I realised, a segment of society that the Conservative party want to ban: socially undesirable, and a subject of endless focus groups on how to tame the feckless elements lurking among the unsuspecting, upstanding citizens of the country. How the hell had this happened?"
No matter what you hope for, life doesn’t ever turn out quite how you expect it to: as friends Giles, Jo, Aimi, Simon, Katie and Max find out through a series of life changing events. Jo, the eternal single girl searches for the courage to let a man into her life; Giles must battle with his demons and accept his sexuality; while Simon can only watch while his beloved girlfriend Aimi fights for her life.
At their heart though is Katie Higgs, brand new mum, aspiring artist and incorrigible dreamer, who is suddenly in the last place she ever wanted to be when she is unceremoniously dumped by her boyfriend Max.
This is the story of Katie adjusting to life as a mummy, and what’s more, the shock of finding herself a single, stay at home, unemployed mummy, rather than one of the yummy variety; and how she, along with all her friends (with the help of more than a few glasses of wine and a lot of soul searching, not to mention a twinkling fairy grandmother and a mystery man called Norman) find their way again and might even get the lives they wanted after all.
Funny and serious, tender and astute, this is a book to read when you need to be wrapped up in a big literary blanket and feel that all is right with the world again.
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