Last Call

December 22, 2003
Pedersen's third novel (Beginner's Luck
; Going Away Party
) takes a darkly comic look at a serious subject. After being diagnosed with terminal liver cancer, 55-year-old Hayden MacBride decides to take control of his situation by plotting his final days. An irrepressible Scotsman now living with his daughter, Diana, and her 11-year old son, Joey, in Brooklyn, Hayden crashes funerals and stockpiles suicide pills ("they can fell a rhino in five minutes," his dying friend, who made them, whispers) in preparation. Hayden's approach changes, though, when he meets a kindred spirit who is railing noisily against the injustice of her inoperable lung cancer. Her name is Rosamond Rogers, and she's the exact opposite of Hayden's beloved late wife. But Hayden takes a shine to her, and convinces her to ditch the hospital and join him and Joey at a baseball game, where he discovers that she's a nun. And so begins an unlikely romance. Challenged by her sudden loss of faith ("I've prayed all my life and now this
," she wails), Rosamond decides that she can't return to the convent. Hayden invites her to live with him and, implausibly, she accepts. The unlikely piles upon the unconvincing, when Bobbie Ann, the prostitute next door, acts as a relationship counselor to a priest, who, with a little prodding from Hayden, decides to change careers and court Diana. If readers can suspend their disbelief—which might be hard—they'll find Pederson's latest offers many funny, tender and bittersweet moments.

January 1, 2004
As she did in " Beginner's Luck" (2003)," "Pedersen teases comic and romantic possibilities from the unlikely collision of strong personalities. The hero of her moving and funny second novel is boisterous, bighearted Hayden MacBride, a middle-aged Scotsman living in Brooklyn with his divorced daughter Diana and her 11-year-old son. Hayden is dying of inoperable cancer, and despite Diana's pleas that he scale back his drinking and carousing in favor of vegetable juice and cheeseburgers made of ground sage, he's determined to squeeze as much joy as possible from his last few months. While visiting a friend in the oncology unit, Hayden meets Rosamond, a nun whose terminal diagnosis has caused her to experience a crisis of faith. When she confides to Hayden that she can't bear to return to her convent, he brings her home to Diana and Joey. Pedersen is especially gifted at portraying the way people unwittingly urge each other to grow and change, particularly in the delicate friendship that springs up between wry, irreverent Hayden and the unworldly Rosamond. A reading-group guide is included.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2004, American Library Association.)