Adventure comedy with a fabulist tint – American Suite humorously challenges our notions of what it means to be American today…
What woman didn’t laugh in amazement when Lorena Bobbit hacked off her husband’s schlong as he slept or watch in disbelief as dentist Clara Harris drove her Mercedes over her philandering husband until she knew he was dead! Author Diana Sheets knows that real women want more! They are done with the lying memoirs and celebrity tales that mainly occupy the best-sellers list and crave something honest, something that captures the zaniness of real life in American today. American Suite is just such a book.
Sheets’s novel comprises the diaries of three women from an affluent, Protestant family; Arisa, Sophie and Rosalyn, whose perspectives often clash and whose diary entries frequently contradict one another. Arisa’s story is the central plot of American Suite. Single, in her mid-thirties and excited about a new life as a writer in the Flatlands, she has ditched her career in Manhattan along with her longtime partner, Ben, and severed ties to her widowed mother and married sister on the East Coast.
At the mercy of her romantic passions, she falls in love with the first male Flatlander she meets just days after arriving in the Midwest, only to find he has a wife and two children. Following a brief but disastrous visit from Ben, Arisa seeks therapy. Life gets worse when she visits New York over Christmas; family problems, finding that Ben has a new love, and an anxiety attack after visiting Ground Zero all force Arisa back to the Flatlands before fleeing to Schlectenberg where she falls in love with a screenwriter and Hollywood director. This lasts until she finds out he has filmed their debauched relationship as material for his new movie, Legs Wide Open! After absconding with the director’s Doberman and a short retreat in a monastery, she returns to the Flatlands determined to tell her version of the affair in her memoir, Shrill Quills & Broken Lenses: This Muse Bares All. From this point on, as Arisa’s life gets nuttier, the story just gets more hilarious as she falls in love with an ex-con and sicks the Doberman on a stalking Peeping Tom who loses his “family jewels” to the Doberman’s iron jaws and has them reattached later by a surgeon.
Rosalyn and Sophie’s stories are interwoven all the while with Arisa’s, and the reader catches up with Sophie’s life as her husband loses his job and Sophie lusts after her son’s tutor. When Sophie’s sons embrace conflicting religions, sailing becomes the family hobby as a means of creating some kind of unity until the boat gets damaged during a race. The sisters decide to celebrate a multicultural December holiday in New York along with Arisa’s ex-con lover, Roy. It turns out to be a huge disaster, but one that glitters nevertheless. Sophie’s diary ends as she embarks on her own ‘memoir,’ Sophie’s Seven Simple Steps to the Perfect Life.
Last, but definitely not least, is Rosalyn’s story. From her diary, readers learn she is a Jewish mother whom God has challenged by making her Christian. We share in her pain as she loses her husband of forty-four years and her joy when she finds Saul, her new partner and love of her life; her anger when she is discarded by her children and her devastation when Saul dies. Inconsolable in her grief, she decides to convert to Judaism and writes her memoir, The Hadassah Chronicles.
The novel concludes with the Peeping Tom seeking revenge for the loss of his virility. He breaks into Arisa’s house where he sees newspaper articles about their scandalous altercation. Arisa returns. Shots are fired. Television viewers are urged to stay tuned for the latest breaking news. Thus, we get a glimpse of today’s American family. Not perfect, but thriving despite its dysfunction. American Suite is a zany, poignant saga that rejoices in the strength and resilience of these three strong women and revels in the complexity of life’s journey.
This exceptional, character-driven novel has received rave reviews and has the makings of becoming a box-office smash hit. For more information on Dr. Diana E. Sheets, please visit her website at: http://www.literarygulag.com.
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TIP SHEET:
Kathleen Kubik, author, Neither Sand Nor Sea: “… edgy comedy of manners. What happens when a WASP family becomes multicultural…a “chick lit” novel that upends our notions about romance, celebrity, family, identity, and our seemingly insatiable hunger for memoir to ask, “Who are we really, and what are we becoming? Diana Sheets has written an incredibly innovative novel…cleverly tells the story of three women, a mother and her two daughters, through compelling diary entries …each juggling their own lives and personal relationships, as well as the often antagonistic familial one among the three of them. Ms. Sheets has skillfully kept each character in character…and their stories are told in such a way that each voice is clearly defined. To simply say, ‘It’s a real page turner,’ somehow doesn’t seem to do American Suite justice, but that is exactly what this book is. I couldn’t wait to discover what wonderful writing awaited me on the next page. My congratulations to Ms. Sheets on an exceptional story.”
Jerry Sander, author of Unlimited Calling (Certain Restrictions Apply): “”Diana Sheets is unafraid of taking on the sacred cows of ‘chick lit’ in a sweeping family saga that offers up sexy men, violent and treacherous romance, dull marriage, soulful union and resourceful women. . . . Religious and spiritual confusions vie for attention with family loyalties and geographic rootedness as a New Yorker moves to the Midwest in search of a good-enough life.”
