I knew from the beginning that somewhere in this book there would be a scene in a hospital and I was more or less correct. There is just nothing new here, unless maybe a reader still finds lesbian romance shocking. I've read too many mother-daughter relationship books, I guess, and books about young women finding themselves. The writing was very good.

Fern's relationship with her mother Nora has always been strained, ever since the messy divorce due to Nora's affairs with women. Nora has eventually settled down with Jeanne, but the tension between mother and daughter remains. Fern's best friend drops her baby into Fern's lap and slowly drifts from the picture, and Fern's most stable relationship is with her dog Lucky, but with the dog's health waning, this seems to be ending as well. And when Nora begins another affair, Fern is first to figure it out and leaps at the chance to judge her mother, but as events progress, she begins to realize her mother is human after all. And with Lucky dying, both mother and daughter come to better understandings about themselves and their relationship with each other. "Lucky in the Corner" is full of glorious complexities about us humans, and Anshaw has written this tale in a tidal mosaic, where episodes from the past and present interweave, blessing the reader with all aspects of these fascinating characters and leaving us with a sense of what family (especially those extended families of non-blood relatives) means.

I found this book at my local library under new fiction and decided to try it out as I'm always looking for new authors to read. I'm so lucky that my fingers happened to pick up this book! What a treasure! Anshaw is a funny and sensitive writer. The only problem is that you've got to read this book slowly because there is so much to absorb! I ignored my husband and children for three days!! I can't wait to read her other two novels.......

Besides relating to the main character's tensility between loving women and loving men, I could also get inside all of the 17 characters and find someone like them in my own life. Any author who can make characters come alive like this is an artist in my book. The dreaminess and soap opera-ness sometimes threw me off, thus it would not make a great movie, but what book ever does? Her writing style is closely aligned with that of Anne Tyler in my opinion. A courageous writer, to explore the topic of who we would be if we took different steps in life, and it ultimately reminded me of the T-Shirt, "Wherever you go, there you are", implying that we all have our lessons we come out of the womb to learn, and she would have to get resolved with Marty and also with her dad's death no matter how colorful or boring her life day-to-day turned out to be.

Anshaw writes with a believability that makes you think this is autobiographical. I haven't got any information on that, but I suspect she's just *THAT GOOD* as a writer. Structured as a set of three closely tied "what-if" novelettes which all use the same characters and same protagonist to examine a particular woman's midlife, Anshaw hits the nail on the head again and again. You will not read many novels concerning sexual ambiguity that are as good as this one. And yet the book is about so much else that I feel unfair in pigeonholing it to some kind of "bi-girl" subgenre.

Even though the writing feels light in many places, the effect slowly starts to pile up in heavier and heavier subtexts until it will have knocked you flat by the end, trust me.

Aquamarine is the kind of book I wanted to savor. It is the only book I ever read which was able to portray the "what ifs" of life so brilliantly; the paths taken and not taken in our lives that eat away at us. I only wish I had written it first!

I thought Seven Moves by Carol Anshaw was going to be an exciting, mysterious, psychological mystery.
It wasn't. I thought the main character Chris Snow would be enduring the dangers of the mid-east in her search for her missing photographer lover, Taylor.
She doesn't.

This book's goal is actually to attempt to examine the relationship between the two women.
However, it doesn't really succeed on any level, including that one.

The author never fully tells the reader what happened to Taylor, the woman who disappeared, but she comes close enough you can surmise the answer.

The thing I found the most disconcerting in reading this novel, was the fact the author chose to tell the entire book in the present verbal tense, which I found highly annoying, and more than a bit distracting.

READ THIS BOOK! I agree with the reviewer who suggested that Oprah select SEVEN MOVES for her book club, as work of this caliber deserves the widest possible audience. I found the comparisons to Updike and Tyler to be superficial, however, and found myself thinking of THE DEEP END OF THE OCEAN. Anshaw, like Mitchard, maps the territory of grief in authentic, haunting language that is poetic, and humorous in the way only real experience can be. Anyone who has ever laughed at themselves about their own "Job-like" afflictions will appreciate how devoid this story is of easy answers, cheap sentiment, and common psycho-babble. On a more conventional note, the evocation of a Morocco with which she is not intimate also had me whistling through my teeth in admiration. Most often,when an author's writing pulls me out of the story, I am reaching for my imaginary blue pencil. In this case, it was the far rarer impulse to underline a breath-taking section of prose. Thank you, Carol Anshaw, and I only hope the wait for your next novel is not too long.

I picked up Seven Moves at my favorite book store in NYC and found a shaded bench in Washington Square Park and started to read. Within the course of a day, with some interruptions and the ride home, I finished it, wiping my eyes dry. There's the wonderful feeling of finding and being with the love of your life. There's the type of mystery of learning that you really might not know your partner. There's the hurt that she didn't trust you. There's a kind of failure for being blind to signals for help. Then there's the feeling of the inevitable and of moving on with your life knowing that each new experience will take you, regretfully, farther away from the present. Carol Anshaw does this in a mere 220 pages with well-crafted sentences, carefully using words that evoke the imagination and the heart. She takes you from the present to the past with flashbacks that reveal the strengh and weakness of relationships, exploring characters. One day after I finished Seven Moves, I picked it up and started reading it again, marking some of the most touching and insightful sentences I've every read.