Welcome to the World, Baby Girl!: A Novel (Elmwood Springs)

With home-cooked, Southern literary flair, Fannie Flagg (Fried Green Tomatoes) returns with Welcome to the World, Baby Girl! "Baby Girl," as she is lovingly referred to by her sweet, country cousins, is Dena Nordstrom, a tall, blonde, corn-fed girl who makes it big in Manhattan. Ms. Nordstrom is now the top TV anchorwoman in the city, beating out veteran journalists and making ungodly amounts of money. Although her life seems charmed, Dena is frazzled and miserable. She drinks uncontrollably, is a borderline compulsive liar, and is forced to undergo therapy because of her stress-induced ulcer. Her psychiatrist, Dr. O'Malley, falls madly in love with her, of course, and sends the blonde bombshell to a close colleague, Dr. Diggers. Living up to her name, Diggers shovels up a mountain of dysfunction and forces Dena to face her mysterious past; all the while the good doctor reports back to brokenhearted O'Malley about her patient's progress. Meanwhile, back at the station, Ms. Nordstrom has made friends and enemies in very high places. Her greatest ally is Howard Kingsley, the Cronkitesque reporter who wields power with more ease than most seasoned politicos: "He closed the door and handed the driver a ten-dollar bill. 'Take this young lady where she wants to go for me, will you? And be careful, she's valuable property.'" It's a good thing she has friends like that, because her boss, Ira Wallace, makes George Costanza from Seinfeld look like a scrupulous saint. When Wallace hires a nasty but effective mole by the name of Sidney Capello to dig up garbage on celebrities, Nordstrom has a head-on collision with his sense of ethics (or lack thereof) and gets Capello canned. Or so she thinks. Welcome to the World, Baby Girl! is very much like its star, Dena Nordstrom: pretty, scattered, confused, and sometimes interesting. It's a long ride from the Whistle Stop Cafe, and readers who enjoy Jan Karon's Mitford Fall series will most likely be the biggest fans of Flagg's third novel.