‘Cleaning Nabokov’s House’ quirky fun

Sometimes, when a midlife crisis unexpectedly socks you in the eye, all you can do is come back up swinging.

Barb Barrett is approaching 40 when her relatively safe, secure life is turned upside down. Her husband is divorcing her and he is taking their two children. And to add insult to injury, he takes up with the court-appointed social worker who is supposed to be monitoring the custody agreement between Barb and the “experson,” as she calls him.

After living in her car for some time, Barb moves into a home once owned by Vladimir Nabokov, the famous author of “Lolita,” and while cleaning out a drawer finds an unusual manuscript, a baseball story featuring Babe Ruth, that she believes is a lost work of his.

Barb knows that if she could get the manuscript published or at least find out who wrote it (as the "experts" don't think it's really Nabokov's work), a lot of her problems could be solved, so she enlists the help of her mailman’s wife, Margie, who happens to be a local book agent.

While waiting for the decision on the manuscript, a process that could take months, Barb must find a way to prove to the courts that she is a responsible mother who can take care of her children to hopefully regain at least partial custody of them. So she comes up with an ingenious idea that just might work in her small town, if it doesn’t backfire and land her in jail.

Leslie Daniel’s humorous novel “Cleaning Nabokov’s House” is a quirky look at how one woman handles the curveballs of life in her own unique and sometimes quite silly way. Written in a light, breezy manner, Daniels pulls her readers into the improbable situations her main character finds herself in, and by the end of the book, shows that a little pluck and a little luck can at least improve a desperate situation, if not remedy it totally.