This was my first look into the increasingly popular "chick lit" fiction arena. It's also become my last, because this was one terrible book. Words fail to describe, and I can't bring myself to recall the dull, lifeless, insipid text.

Should I allow one bad reading experience to keep me from the genre? Perhaps, if you consider the praise heaped on this clunker! Instead, if you're into semi-fictional accounts of women, adolescent or otherwise, stick with Jane Austen and Louisa May Alcott. They are referred to as "classics" for all the best reasons.

The only reason I did not give this book one star is because the beginning of it was very well-written. Had the tone and pacing remained the same, it could have been great. However, the middle and end of the book were atrocious! The author was attempting to wax philosophic in a gritty, detatched voice, but merely succeeded in writing a story completely devoid of plot or purpose. I agree with the reviewer who said that mothers who had lost a child would find this book insulting. Yes, everyone deals with loss in different ways, but bedding a teenager AND his father as a means to heal the pain is just disturbing. I kept hoping there was a padded room and a straight jacket waiting for her at the end of the book. I would have been satisfied if she'd ended up with a prescription for Xanax; after reading this book I feel like I need one!

Lisa Zeidner's "Layover" is lean and more than a little mean, largely because it's from the point of view of Zeidner's first-person protagonist, Claire Newbold, whose only child was killed in a car accident some time before the story begins. It's about battling the urge to escape from grief into cynicism, but don't be put off. Zeidner has a light touch and a sharp sense of humor, and she'ss anything but maudlin.

Claire is middle-aged, a traveling saleswoman of high-tech medical supplies. Early in the novel she begins a hotel-hopping journey of self-discovery that jeopardizes her job, marriage and sanity. What sets her off is a confession by her surgeon husband that he has had an affair with a woman colleague, and what helps bring her back from the brink are sexual encounters with an 18-year-old boy and then with the boy's father. Zeidner manages to make both encounters believable.

There's good dialogue and sharply amusing observations about American life at the end of the 20th century, but the biggest surprise is the skill with which Zeidner writes about sex. "Layover" is playfully and insightfully erotic, a quality most American writers can't seem to imagine, let alone capture on the page.

I didn't quite like Claire - she's smug and intolerant of human frailties, a vagabond with a big bank account - but I believed her grief and admired the way Zeidner handled her struggle to overcome the sense that she and everyone else are doomed to suffer in solitude. Claire wants to return to normal life but is plagued by the feeling that she knew her husband "so well I couldn't see him anymore. I knew him the way I knew myself. All of our years together - they weren't money in the bank. They were cash in a mattress that could burn."

"Layover" is funny and sad, smart and brave. Read it if you like fiction that explores what it means to be human.

This book was not what I expected it to be, necessarily. It wasn't one of those books to be read in a single sitting, but the story really drew me in. I thought that the character development was brilliant, as least as far as Claire was concerned. I genuinely wanted to know what was going on in her mind and what was going to happen to her next. This book is very insightful, and written very cleverly. I know that I won't hesitate to read other works by Zeidner.

People express grief in different ways."Layover" is the story of a grieving woman--41 year-old Claire Newbold--whose young child, Evan, recently died. Claire is a travelling saleswoman, married to a surgeon who admonishes her that "she needs to feel connected," and then confesses to an affair at the worst possible moment. Reeling from the knowledge of her husband's affair while still in the grief process, Claire undergoes a breakdown. She steps out of her life one day, and soon finds that it is not easy to return--even if she wants to.

Once outside of her life, Claire discovers that she can pretend to be anything she wants, and she begins to engage in odd behaviour. Using her knowledge of hotels, she begins a odyssey of self-discovery that includes sexual encounters with strangers, memories of her lost son, and a one-sided conversation with "the other woman."

I really enjoyed this book. It was original, and despite the subject matter, it was not a depressing read. Some readers may be offended by the sexual content. To me, the book simply reiterated the fact that you never know what hell the person standing right in front of you may be going through. This book was thought provoking. I recommend it, and I will look for other books by Zeidner in the future--displacedhuman