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Borrowed Lives

Laramie Dunaway
Iota Publishing (2008)
ISBN 9780979372025
Reviewed by Karrie Grobben for RebeccasReads (10/08)

Borrowed Lives, the impossibly funny and charmingly crass rollercoaster ride of a novel, is Laramie Dunaway’s second book and tells the story of Luna, whose going-nowhere life takes a violently sudden turn when her insomnia-suffering friend Ratface begins firing at random one night—injuring Luna herself and taking the life of her brilliant, beautiful best friend, Wren. Though traumatized by the event, it gives Luna a much-needed jolt and allows her to see the essential waste of a life she is leading. While Wren was gorgeous, funny and a full-fledged genius that had earned several degrees in various subjects and was on the cusp of what promised to be a wonderful career, Luna merely trudged through life. Her academic job as an English PhD student was both unfulfilling and badly paid. Her ex-boyfriend, whom she continued to be obsessed with, was in love with someone else. Her mother having died, her anthropologist father was both absent and apparently engaged to a fifteen-year-old in a third-world country… With Wren dead and her own prospects looking ridiculously gloomy, Luna latches on to a sudden idea: why not simply cast her own life aside and borrow someone else’s? Let’s face it; Wren’s was looking pretty good.
           
So the toils of our rambling, lovable, put-upon heroine begin—and only become more complicated. The story asks us to occasionally stretch our credulity when, for example, we discover that all of Wren’s interviews were conducted by e-mail or phone and so Luna need merely fake some paperwork and move to a new city to take Wren’s dream job as a writer at a newly-vamped high profile magazine. It isn’t long before she gets into hot water, however, and in the space of just a few days, feels herself being subtly pushed out by an intimidated colleague. Having, in her total experience, dropped the ball when she was given the assignment to cover a shocking murder case on her first day; her easily disillusioned boss yanks her off the story.

But strangely enough, inhabiting Wren’s life and with Wren’s reputation, Luna finds herself being somewhat disinclined to being patronized and manipulated like this. While the old Luna more or less accepted the essential irritability that came with her job, Luna as Wren is now more than determined to write the story. Though she does not have Wren’s brilliant mind, she does have guts—and it is more or less through feistiness and determination that opportunities come knocking her door down. Soon the previously terminally single young woman has more or less fallen into a love affair with a handsome, funny, wealthy guy who offers her (in bed) the opportunity to write a script based on the very murder case she was originally assigned to cover.
           
Yet just as happiness appears as achievable as stealing someone else’s identity, Wren’s ex-con ex-husband appears on the scene, happily moves into her apartment without asking and all too willingly accepts the nature of Luna’s scheme—with the understanding that his criminal ventures will now be operating out of her apartment…
           
Ah, the best laid plans.

I highly recommend Borrowed Lives as a warm, rambunctious read filled with the most amazingly bizarre and hilarious plot twists, written by an author I am confident to hear more from—the sheer nonchalance with which she spins this sexy, convoluted and fabulous tale that leads this reviewer to run out of adjectives makes her book worth reading and the heroine quite unforgettable.

    

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