Go ahead, name me the small pleasure that gets you through a deadly-dull afternoon. Is it a chocolate bar? A certain Pandora station? Feeling your favorite jade earrings swinging from your ears? A stop at the gas station, where you know exactly where the pink snowballs sit on the shelf and it wouldn’t hurt to buy just one this afternoon?

What if your fortunes fell and you could no longer afford your pink snowball?

That’s what we’re talking about in Anne-Marie Casey’s No One Could Have Guessed the Weather. Lucy, our protagonist, falls on hard times. She and her husband and two kids give up their London life for an 800-square-foot apartment in New York City.

Queensboro Bridge. (photo credit)

Folks like me, who can’t afford even 400 feet in NYC, might wonder what’s so hard-timey about that (especially when the author announced in her bio that she’s in a love/love relationship with NYC). Folks like me whose fallen fortunes might send us off to some small town in Mississippi (see last week’s post) or the tundras of Wisconsin, might like to trade with Lucy.

What we have to understand about Lucy is that her normal includes nannies, housekeepers, and schemes for getting her children into Cambridge.

Reluctantly, she makes new friends in New York: Julia, a successful screenwriter who writes all night, fueled by Red Bull and vodka; Christy, a trophy wife defending her territory against creamy women aspiring to take her place beside her filthy rich old-man husband.

I had some difficulty following the through-line on these women and their world of cream-colored pants and yoga classes, particularly when author Casey introduces Robyn into the mix. Robyn is a chubby mattress-store manager, obliged to pay the bills so her husband is free to work on his inscrutable novel. But then, Robyn’s sorry life takes an exciting turn and the story gelled for me.

Would that it had happened before the halfway mark.

Still, I’d call this a four-star read, stocked with more than a few good laugh lines.

Grand Central Station (photo credit)