If you are looking for a funny, heart warming book with characters that are easy to relate to and a healthy mix of heavy and light subject material, I definitely recommend checking out Deep Down True by Juliette Fay.

At it’s root, this book is a fairly standard “chick lit” novel (though I cringe to say so as so many chick lit novels have given this genre a bad name), or rather the new breed of Mom Lit which is becoming so popular, luckily for me as it’s one of my preferred genres lately.

But I think you’ll find a little of everything in this story which is such a true to life representation of the hodge podge that is motherhood.

Here’s a quick description from GoodReads.com as I feel like they sum it up better than I can:

Newly divorced Dana Stellgarten has always been unfailingly nice- even to telemarketers-but now her temper is wearing thin. Money is tight, her kids are reeling from their dad’s departure, and her Goth teenage niece has just landed on her doorstep. As she enters the slipstream of post-divorce romance and is befriended by the town queen bee, Dana finds that the tension between being true to yourself and being liked doesn’t end in middle school… and that sometimes it takes a real friend to help you embrace adulthood in all its flawed complexity.

There were a several elements to this story that I can’t really relate to, but the characters are so well fleshed out and so realistic that I found I could relate to them anyway and really enjoyed getting to know Dana and her friends and family. I appreciated the fact that there was such a liberal mix of heavy and light subject material – not too dark, but not too sunny.

And I frequently found myself giggling or nodding in a knowing sort of agreement with little observations the main character makes throughout the book. The author does a terrific job of pulling you into the story and getting you to root for Dana – to groan when she makes silly mistakes, get upset when people are unfair and applaud with delight when things finally start to go her way again.

This was not a perfect book. Occasionally the descriptions were almost too detailed sometimes and pulled me out of the story to nit pick over word choice. But overall I think it was very well told and wonderfully written.