Stuff We Love: Reader's Choice

Sweet and Low

In Sweet Ruin (Pocket Books, $24), Elayna Leopold is a classic suburbanista. Once an ambitious magazine editor juggling life in the big city and a sexually active social world, she now finds herself, at 35, stranded in New Jersey while her lawyer husband works long hours in the city. Her depression is deepened by the loss of a baby two years ago. But this spring something is changing. "That brilliant April… it felt to me as if the earth and the plants, the insects and trees, just couldn't stay in their pants," she says. Enter a hot young sculptor who lavishes Elayna with the kind of attention her husband just isn't giving up — and who is nice to her daughter — and you've got a pressure cooker of a situation. How can Elayna be a good mother and her own person, a faithful wife and a sexual being? Author Cathi Hanauer's treatment of Elayna's marriage is particularly sensitive, complex and sure-footed. That makes sense when you consider that Hanauer and her husband, Daniel Jones, are two of iVillage's relationship experts. We sure know how to pick 'em, don't we?

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