Margaret Overton is a smart, accomplished anesthesiologist, but in caring for others, she's overlooked learning to care for herself. If Good in a Crisis were a novel, readers might doubt the plausibility of her tribulations: a heroine with a spouse hell-bent on an acrimonious divorce; two beloved daughters leaving for college, one suffering a serious accident and long recovery; the death of several close friends; her mother slipping into dementia; relocation, remodeling, reshuffling of material goods... and a brain aneurysm?!
Margaret really does endure them all--but her story is filled with a surprising amount of humor. In a sardonic look at her divorce in the first paragraph, for example, she notes that her friends refer to her ex as "the sperm donor"--even after 20 years, he doesn't deserve the title of husband. Then, too, there's her foray into Internet dating: "It was like the Home Shopping Network, only better," she writes, "a weirdly attractive combination of shopping, romance, and voyeurism, without any calories or shipping charges."
Margaret exercises, works and is devoted to her daughters, friends, aging dog and mother. As she recounts her challenges, jokes about her romantic escapades and acknowledges the loving support of her friends and family, readers will cheer her resilience and heed her advice: "If you, like me, can survive your own middle age trauma, you might move on to a chapter of life that you think of as wisdom, since it sounds more appealing than dotage." --Cheryl Krocker McKeon, bookseller