When Jill becomes both pregnant and single at the end of one spring semester, she and her two closest friends plunge into an experiment in tri-parenting, tri-schooling, and trihabitating as grad students in Seattle. Naturally, everything goes wrong, but in ways no one sees coming. Janey Duncan narrates the adventure of this modern family with hilarity and wisdom and shows how three lives are forever changed by (un)cooperative parenting, literature, and a tiny baby named Atlas who upends and uplifts their entire world. In this sparkling and wise debut novel, The Atlas of Love, Frankel's unforgettable heroines prove that home is simply where the love is. First-novelist Frankel mashes together a number of themes familiar to readers of women’s fiction—though not quite in the way they’re combined here—sprinkling the whole with liberal doses of low-key humor. Canadian Janey, Mormon Katie, and vegetarian Jill all become good friends while attending graduate school in Seattle. Although they share a love of literature—they’re English-lit students—they are quite different in their approaches to life and love. Then Jill becomes pregnant by her much younger boyfriend, who decides he cannot handle the burdens of parenthood. Both Janey and Katie immediately volunteer to move in with her and help her raise her child. Janey, especially, falls in love with the baby they name Atlas, and they begin the herculean task of juggling their schedules between teaching, studying, and child care. A medical emergency involving Atlas, though, soon tests their idealistic arrangement in unforeseen ways. Frankel proves insightful on the topic of friendship, incorporates a foodie’s love of cooking, and overly idealizes a few of the characters; but this is a feel-good novel, after all, and ultimately a celebration of modern family life and the myriad forms it can take.#hardcover#fiction#parenthood#love#drama#friendship#relationships