cover image Just Desserts

Just Desserts

Patti Massman. Crown Publishers, $19 (0pp) ISBN 978-0-517-58067-7

Fifty pounds overweight and emotionally terrorized by a husband who wants her slim-waisted again, Encino housewife Diana Lowe is in desperate straits as this trifling first novel opens. But as soon as a doctor teaches her to count grams of fat instead of calories, her nasty husband walks out the door. Although the reader welcomes Harvey's exit, Diana is devastated. Her heart pounding as his car backs out of their driveway and out of her life, she is ``surprised to feel the thu-thump for she felt as if she had died.'' Very much alive, though, and suddenly ravenous, Diana is just about to plunge headlong into the Haagen-Dazs when she has an epiphany: ``You're allergic to fat, so you won't eat this. You're allergic to fat, so you can't eat this.'' A pretty nice mantra, she decides, and begins chanting it out loud ``in rhythm with the swirl of the remaining ice cream as it washes down the drain.'' Wonderful changes are instantaneously afoot: a sleek new body, interest from both a fabulously wealthy playboy and a sensitive hunk, a book contract, a European tour, fabulous wealth of her own, a private jet, inner peace. Not to mention great sex and plenty of it, though there is one interlude with an ice cube that may leave some readers, well--cold. (May)