2 Books by Elyse Friedman
Requirements: .ePUB reader, 2.7 MB | Retail
Overview: ELYSE FRIEDMAN is a Toronto-based author, screenwriter and voice-actor. Her writing has been short-listed for the Trillium Book Award, The Toronto Book Award, the Relit Award and numerous National Magazine Awards. Elyse’s fiction has appeared in Best Canadian Stories and The Journey Prize Anthology, and her story, The Soother, won the gold National Magazine Award for fiction. Elyse has written two feature films, one of which premiered at TIFF, the other at the Sundance Film Festival.
Genre: Fiction > Women’s Fiction, Chick-lit
Waking Beauty (2010)
What would you do if you went to bed ugly, fat, and depressed and woke up the next morning in the body of a goddess?
This is exactly the miracle that befalls Allison Penny, who has spent most of her twenty-two years on this earth in a serious slump (to say the least).
Having long since given up on her life, Allison is stuck in an apartment with an evil sexpot roommate, trapped in a dysfunctional relationship with her alcoholic mother, and miserably working as a cleaning lady to pay the bills. Now, of course, Allison wastes no time in test-driving her new looks, and she experiences all of the power and fun that come with being gorgeous. Men and modeling agencies are falling all over her, and she finally has the confidence to live her life without trying to disappear into the background. But even for the beautiful people, things can get complicated, and soon Allison finds herself with a whole new set of problems.
Darkly hilarious, engaging, and full of surprises, Waking Beauty is a modern-day fairy tale with an all-too-real moral: No matter how much we hate to admit it, it’s what’s on the outside that counts.
The Answer To Everything (2014)
John Aarons, a brilliant but perpetually broke artist, knows how to cadge a meal or seize an opportunity when he spies one. Turned out on the street by his fully employed, entirely fed up girlfriend, he goes on the hunt for cheap shared accommodation and stumbles upon the ideal set-up—a bedroom in the home of Amy, an attractive psychology student who has been abandoned by her condo-buying roommate. Not only does Amy have a surprisingly affordable penthouse apartment with rooftop patio and a fridge full of high-quality comestibles, but she also has a mysterious across-the-hall neighbour, Eldrich, who appears to be home all day, smoking weed and receiving an odd assortment of visitors.
Before long, John is availing himself of Eldrich’s pot, food and wine. He notices that these staples are provided gratis to Eldrich by friends and acquaintances who rely on him for spiritual guidance. That’s when John, atheist and misanthrope, decides to start a New Age cult with Eldrich as guru. And so, as half art project, half money-making scheme, the Answer Institute is born. With Amy as a partner in the enterprise, the cult flourishes and grows exponentially, attracting a wide range of broken, strange and spiritually hungry individuals, including an obscenely wealthy Singaporean expat, a psilocybin-dealing hippie, a conservative mom mourning the death of her only child, and the star of a popular sci-fi TV show. Eldrich begins to embrace his role as Leader with a little too much zeal and introduces his followers to increasingly peculiar rituals. Amy becomes progressively more enamoured of the funds pouring into the coffers, and John lets sexual jealousy get the better of him. The more successful the Institute gets, the more it spirals out of control, culminating in a bizarre ayahuasca ceremony that ends in a way nobody could have expected.
With humour and pathos, The Answer to Everything examines the gap between reason and faith, and the human need for connection, love and transcendence.
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