The Only Boy for Me

I just really like the way she writes. Laugh out loud funny but full of characters you care about. ( )

Gil McNeil's debut novel, in which single mother Annie Baker is a freelance producer for a television advertising company, and lives in the English countryside with her six-year-old, Charlie. Her chaotic and idyllic life becomes more so when she meets Mack, a TV commercial producer. Gil McNeil writes about single motherhood and balancing the demands of life with a sure and gentle humor that I've become very fond of. This isn't classic literature, but it's honest and wryly funny, with a deadpan dialogue from her characters that I quite enjoy. And always, the emphasis is on the fact that in motherhood (and fatherhood too, presumably), the child is always first. The tricky part is in not confusing what the child wants with what the child needs. The characters are not as well-defined as in McNeil's later trio of books starting with "The Beach Street Knitting Society and Yarn Club", but it's a very promising beginning that later delivers on that promise. ( )