Summer reads

"Slummy Mummy"
By Fiona Neill
Riverhead, $24.95

"Slummy Mummy" opens with a gulp -- that of Lucy Sweeney's husband swallowing one of her contact lenses, which she had foolishly left to soak overnight in a mug. "I'm not going to try to make myself sick this time," the long-suffering (but secretly devoted) husband warns her. "Wear your glasses."

Like Allison Pearson's "I Don't Know How She Does It" -- the birth mama of this genre -- "Slummy Mummy" originally ran in serial form in a British newspaper, giving it the kind of snappy humor and leisurely pace just right for drowsy summer afternoons. Or should I say, drowsy summer afternoons interrupted by kids who have somehow gotten sand in their underpants or stumbled into a patch of poison sumac.

Fiona Neill lays on just the right amount of lifelike and self-deprecating detail in her depiction of Lucy, a former London TV producer who still can't get the hang of being a stay-at-home mom. The yummy mummies at her son's school exude glamour and ease, while Lucy bumbles even the most mundane of activities. Trying to look chic at a school event, she realizes that the bulge in the calf of her skinny jeans is actually yesterday's knickers. And when she develops a crush on a handsome fellow parent she nicknames "Sexy Domesticated Dad," Lucy is beset by a guilty feeling she equates to sneaking a cigarette and "reconnecting momentarily with a feeling of liberation associated with a different period in my life, when pleasure was there for the taking."

That doesn't stop her from flirting, though, or from living vicariously through her reckless, child-free friends who date married men and use their phones for text-message sex. In Lucy, Neill has created a neurotic, likable heroine whose charms shine through the predictable plot.

-- Joy Press

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