None of This Would Have Happened If Prince Were Alive

Starred review from July 1, 2022

DEBUT Ramona catches her husband cheating, setting off events that culminate with a Category 4 hurricane. Savannah is under hurricane watch, but Ramona has more than the weather on her mind; her daughter is struggling with potty training, her son needs to take care of the class guinea pig, the 16-year-old boy next door is living alone, and her mother refuses to leave her ramshackle waterfront home. Then Ramona throws her husband out, piles her kids plus the teen next door into her minivan, and takes off for safer ground. Her mom refuses to go, saying she'll evacuate with a friend. Ramona hits the road but heads back into the eye of the storm when her mother refuses to leave. Meanwhile, her husband, his fling, and her boss are bombarding her with texts, and she yearns for the days when her life felt like a Prince song. It's all too much, and in Prusa's hands, too funny. Caring for her kids and mother puts Ramona squarely in the sandwich generation, but she manages to handle it all with aplomb, while providing cultural touchstones along the way. VERDICT Family drama has never been so much fun. Fans of Maria Semple, Jennifer Weiner, and Laurie Gelman will enjoy Prusa's debut.--Stacy Alesi

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September 19, 2022
Prusa’s engaging debut chronicles two days of upheavals for a Savannah, Ga., working mother as Hurricane Matthew closes in, in 2016. Ramona, a Prince fan and 38-year-old mother of two, catches her husband, Desmond, cheating on her. Already overwhelmed by potty training their younger child and dealing with her unreasonable boss, who expects her to report to work during the category four storm, Ramona heeds evacuation orders and heads to a friend’s home in Augusta with her two kids and Baily, a neighbor’s kindly teenage son who has been left at home alone. After Ramona learns her headstrong mother, Adelaide, won’t evacuate because she doesn’t want to leave her pets behind, Ramona and company return to Savannah to ensure Adelaide’s safety. There, she learns more about Bailey’s precarious home situation and confronts Desmond as the storm makes landfall. Ramona proves to be an amiable narrator, with her musings about the death of Prince (“Prince has been gone six months, and the world already feels less sparkly”) mixed with reflections on what it takes to be a good mom. There’s a lot to enjoy in this thoughtful outing. Agent: Maggie Cooper, Aevitas Creative.

October 15, 2022
As Hurricane Matthew sweeps toward Savannah, Georgia, a woman's life begin to fall apart. Ramona, 38, is wife to Desmond, mother to 7-year-old Alex and 3-year-old Nanette, daughter of Adelaide, and employee of Kenneth of the too-tight trousers. She is also a fan of Prince and a one-time painter and art student. Ramona has a cleareyed view of everyone around her, seeing them as entire people with parts she loves (well, for family and friends) and parts she doesn't. With an evacuation order looming, she rushes from work to pick up her daughter from her friend/babysitter's house because she can't get a hold of her husband. When she arrives home with Nanette in tow, she finds a fellow mom standing in front of the fridge drinking the last coconut La Croix, and then her husband appears in his boxers. Clearly, the pair are post-coitus. The story follows Ramona's efforts to get her kids and mother evacuated to safety as the storm bears down on them, fending off calls from her husband and the fellow mom as she tries to buy time to figure out what went wrong with her marriage and how she feels about it. This story is told episodically, with Ramona's memories of past experiences, moments, and Prince songs interspersed with a timeline of her evacuation efforts. Author Prusa does a very good job of presenting all the stress of potty training a toddler while managing their outrageous behavior; convincing a cantankerous senior mother to do something (that is, evacuate) when she doesn't want to; managing a boss's unreasonable expectations during a natural disaster; and trying to create an outward sense of calm and safety for others when inner turmoil is almost out of control. A story that explores how individual identity and happiness can be unintentionally misplaced in marriage and motherhood.

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Starred review from April 15, 2022
Between her daughter's disinterest in potty training, her boss' flippant attitude toward work-life balance, and her husband's affair with a fellow mom from her son's school, Ramona has a lot on her plate--and now a hurricane is bearing down on Savannah. Thanks to a mandatory evacuation, she's loading her kids (plus her teenage neighbor) and the class guinea pig into her minivan and heading out of town--only to turn around and drive right back into the storm to collect her mother from the rickety beachfront home she refuses to leave. It's a road trip only a mother could tolerate, full of random pit stops for food and minigolf, "urgent" video conferences for work, and phone calls from both her wayward husband and the other woman. Through clever flashbacks, Prusa shows Ramona's transformation from a carefree young woman to a frazzled, stressed-out, working mother. Gen X readers will love the pop-culture references sprinkled throughout the book as well as the honest depiction of life in the sandwich generation: those years when women are caregivers for both children and aging parents. This energetic, uproariously funny portrait of motherhood will appeal to fans of Laurie Gelman and Maria Semple.

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