Pool Party (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780228874706)

Cockroaches! Filthy people had cockroaches. She wasn't filthy, but she obviously had cockroaches. "Honey, everybody in Florida has cockroaches." Comfort from a con, Marcie's from-then-on boyfriend she can't get rid of, when she really wants Tim, a recovering addict on meds who doesn't want any woman, because he's afraid of his feelings, and especially not Marcie, who reminds him of his ex-wife. This is just the tip of the iceberg of comic drama Marcie finds herself in the midst of after leaving waitressing in Calgary to try making a living in Florida as an artist. She's thirty, burnt out with the whole drinking culture, and, ironically, finds herself back in it again, just from living in her apartment-home complex and meeting some of her neighbours, who were out playing poker the evening she arrived when she found herself locked out of her suite. Also, she discovers Canadians and Americans just aren't the same, at least in her corner of Tampa. Watch Marcie humourously navigate new social norms, guns, promises of marriage, debt, men, purported sharks, unexpected weather, sights of economic disparity, the possibility of her having become an inadvertent accomplice in crime, and the wreckage of drinking, as she explores ways of remaining in the Sunshine State. She lands in one farcical situation after another, from being an inadvertent stowaway on a cruise ship to being let out of a car on the Veteran's Expressway.