Featuring . . . Bad Marie by Marcy Dermansky

This Friday and every Friday for the next several months I'll be featuring a book in the Harper Perennial Imprint. Some were recently published, some will be released later this year, all are worth a closer look.

I think it was the quote by Frederick Barthelme on the publisher's website that first attracted me to Bad Marie by Marcy Dermansky. Barthelme said, in part: "It’s sinful in all the right ways, delicate, seditious, and deliciously evil." Who can resist?

Here's the publisher's summary:

Bad Marie is the story of Marie, tall, voluptuous, beautiful, thirty years old, and fresh from six years in prison for being an accessory to murder and armed robbery. The only job Marie can get on the outside is as a nanny for her childhood friend Ellen Kendall, an upwardly mobile Manhattan executive whose mother employed Marie's mother as a housekeeper. After Marie moves in with Ellen, Ellen's angelic baby Caitlin, and Ellen's husband, a very attractive French novelist named Benoit Doniel, things get complicated, and almost before she knows what she's doing, Marie has absconded to Paris with both Caitlin and Benoit Doniel. On the run and out of her depth, Marie will travel to distant shores and experience the highs and lows of foreign culture, lawless living, and motherhood as she figures out how to be an adult; how deeply she can love; and what it truly means to be "bad."

I looking forward to seeing just how bad Marie really is. Well, okay, stealing your friend's husband and child is pretty bad, but is Marie all evil? I'm also interested in seeing how she copes with a kid in Paris; I'm sure it's not what she thought it would be.

Here are two reactions to Bad Marie:

• In an interview on Literary Kicks, Levi Asher says: "Another thing I like about this novel is the pacing. It moves pretty quickly--from friendship to enemy-hood, from New York to Paris to Mexico, from love to hate and back again."
• And on Genre Go Round Reviews, Harriet says: "Readers will enjoy Bad Marie while wondering whether the anti-heroine will prove heroic when it comes to the wellbeing of the toddler."

To learn more about the novel and Marcy Dermansky, visit the author's blog and the Bad Marie page on the publisher's website.

This book was featured as part of my Spotlight on the Harper Perennial imprint. For information about the imprint, please read Erica Barmash's welcome note posted here on June 18, 2010. You might also want to visit the The Olive Reader, the Harper Perennial blog.

Bad Marie at an Indie

Bad Marie at Powell's
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Published by HarperCollins / Harper Perennial, July 2010
ISBN-13: 9780061914713