How Elizabeth Barrett Browning Saved My Life

Suffering a bout of mid-30s inertia, Abby Randolph, a Harvard dropout– cum–struggling antiques dealer, has all but given up on herself. Her mother perished a year earlier in an earthquake in India. Her childhood love and ex-fiancé has penned a tell-all novel exposing Abby's awkward childhood, troubled adolescence and thwarted foray into academia. With a litany of insulting confessions, her most recent boyfriend leaves her for another woman. But when a colleague suggests she take the porcelain chamber pot left to her by her mother onto the TV program Antiques Roadshow —where experts tell her it belonged to the poet of the novel's title—fantastic pipe dreams of uncovering treasure materialize. The pot's pedigree sets in motion a series of misadventures, forcing Abby to get in gear and off the couch. The jokes in Medwed's fourth novel (following The End of an Era ) don't always pan out, but this buoyant "dramady" is a wry, easy read for flea market scavengers and collectors alike, those who can appreciate how "objects of desire... the hairline crack in an old vase, the foxing in an old print, the clouded glass of an old decanter mark the passage of time, commemorate the history of people's lives." (Mar.)