Praise for Lise Haines's Small Acts of Sex and Electricity
From the Jacket
With the sudden departure of her best friend, Mattie recalls all the years she has walked along the edges of Jane's world. Now she must decide whether to step as courageously into Jane's life as she has slipped into her bed. Jane has everything that Mattie thinks she wants. But Jane always works to damage what she's given. Mattie knows that better than anyone. But even she is caught off guard when Jane leaves her whole life behind one broken morning, before dawn. By driving away, Jane has forced open the question s that have always hung in the air between them -- questions about desire and envy and integrity. These are issues of the heart that reveal themselves, not through the bold and dramatic gestures of a woman like Jane, but in even the briefest moments and the smallest of acts.
"Whether Lise Haines's characters are doing needlepoint, or playing miniature golf, or exchanging lives, they are fiercely intelligent, provocatively funny, and profoundly aware of the complexities of love and friendship. As SMALL ACTS OF SEX AND ELECTRICITY joyfully reminds us, here is an author who writes like no one else. Our world is the richer for her glittering work."
--Margot Livesey
"Lise Haines's wonderful new novel, SMALL ACTS OF SEX AND ELECTRICITY, holds the reader enthralled from beginning to end as it explores the boundaries of sex, love and friendship. Very few writers could have pulled off the twists and turns within these relationships with such grace and strength."
--Jill McCorkle
A lyrical, earnest second novel from Haines (after In My Sister's Country) portrays two women whose love for the same man challenges their lifelong friendship. Set at a Southern California beach house, the action erupts when Jane, having inherited the house from her recently deceased grandmother Franny, decides to leave her husband, Mike, and two daughters in the care of her best friend from childhood, Mattie, now a fine-arts appraiser in Chicago. The women attended the same Boston university, where Mattie first fell for Mike, before the more glamorous and determined Jane swept him away and married him. Presently in their mid-30s, the women essentially trade places over the course of several weeks, as Jane takes off to pick up men and have adventures, leaving Mattie to make sense of Franny's extensive estate of artworks, assuage the fears of Jane and Mike's two young daughters and fall in love with Mike all over again. Jane's self-absorption is beyond the pale, and Mattie's skittish neediness is touching, in this spacey, sexy summer read.
From Booklist
Thirtysomething Chicago art appraiser Mattie is back in Santa Barbara, where she met Jane when they were girls, to help sort through the many objets d'artin the old beach house, sold now that Jane's grandmother is dead. One dawning, Jane drives off in the 40-year-old Jaguar, leaving her uninformed husband and daughters to Mattie, who, secretly in love with Mike for years, never saw this coming despite a self-proclaimed gift for premonition. Jane calls the next day to blithely say the Jag needs towing, and she'll be visiting "a very large Paul Bunyan monument I want to see." Though or because Mattie possesses the "particular deficit of emotion to move freely through other people's lives" that is so necessary in her profession, in mere hours Mattie and Mike are making love in the bed he'd shared with Jane. Haines skillfully uses flashbacks and rapid-fire dialogue to make and keep things credible as Mattie takes over Jane's life in this oddly compelling tale of loss . . and losing detachment.
<<read an interview with Lise Haines>>