Thank Heavens, Someone Wrote Something I Don't Feel Like Complaining About!

I'm going to wholeheartedly recommend the book Subway Girl by Donna Beck.

 

I've posted a review of it on Amazon.com, but I'll copy it here in case you're too stubborn to just take my recommendation and go buy it.

I've never understood how people of ordinary means live in New York City, where even a shoebox apartment rents for an arm and a leg. But among this book’s many accomplishments, it immersed me in what it might be like to live on the low end of the economic scale in the Big Apple, below even ordinary means - and what's more, how grateful you might be to live that way. The narrator, Ray Kelly, opens the story with his life in a shambles, a bare step above homelessness. Yet despite his precarious and even shabby existence, Ray comes across as not just likable but worthy of our respect -- primarily because of his self-deprecating sense of humor and the way he views and treats others. In Ray, author Donna Beck has created a fully realized, intense, appealing protagonist who is at once masculine and sensitive, downtrodden and hopeful, ordinary and extraordinary. Through his eyes we see a side of New York that is grungy and yet not bleak, squalid and yet not miserable. We join Ray at a low point in his life, but he never asks for our sympathy or anyone else's, and when a chance meeting with an attractive young woman upends him from his day-to-day daze, we immediately find ourselves rooting for him not just because we want the good guy to get the girl, but because we want life to be the kind of vibrant experience that Ray wakes up to and works to make real.

 The other central figure in the book, Alicia Kaer, begins in circumstances that seem outwardly the opposite of Ray's. She's employed, in school, working towards a career as a CPA, and seemingly doing everything right. But inside, in her own way, she's on the same kind of autopilot that Ray has been on, and we come to learn that in reality her situation is one of even greater desperation than his.

 Beck brings these two characters to life and brings them together, puts them through an emotionally charged and sometimes challenging courtship, has each teach the other, and in the process lets us know things we perhaps did not know before, and better understand if we did know. This is a book that revels in all the bright colors of life without shrinking from the dark ones. It’s a story of great humor and deep humanity, with a streak of passion that simmers and then flares with erotic heat as Ray and Alicia grow ever closer. And it features a diverse, vivacious supporting cast that adds charm and reality to the great metropolitan backdrop against which the romantic focus plays out.

 It’s a book that’s not just worth reading, but then, if you have the time, worth reading again.

Do me a favor and go read the preview and see if it doesn't catch your fancy.