A Little Love Story
Jake Entwhistle's mother is losing her mind, his sister is on drugs in Reno, and his girlfriend died on a 9/11 airliner. Just as this Bostonian Job is ending his mourning, a sequence of odd events brings him to fall in love with a woman dying of cystic fibrosis. Merullo, author of Revere Beach Elegy, tries to inject this book with humor, but it comes off as a low moan, better suited to the chill of winter than the summer heat. It's beach reading for the clinically depressed.