The author takes stock of the tribulations, tragedy and hilarity that has shaped her experiences thus far, reexamining religious roots, familial influences and personal choices. Janzen (English and Creating Writing/Hope Coll.; poems: Babel's Stair, 2006) excavates her past with the might of a backhoe and the finesse of an archaeologist's brush. Lines as jolting as "Nick had been drinking and offering to kill me and then himself," about her troubled ex-husband, are tempered by poignant moments of grace during her recovery from a debilitating accident: "Because I couldn't raise my right arm, students sprang up to take notes on the board." The author's relatives feature prominently throughout the narrative, her mother's quirky sensibilities bubbling over in merry nuggets of old-fashioned, home-spun wisdom. Punctuating overarching themes of blithe humor and Mennonite values are brief glimpses of raw despair, which Janzen eloquently, albeit briefly, explores. The recurring question of whether her abusive former spouse ever loved her is found in numerous contextssolemn, analytical, even whimsical. After hesitantly re-entering the dating world, the author faced the revelation that she is woefully codependent by creating her own 12-step program, with directives such as "Step Two: Sit Down at the Computer with Wild Medusa Hair" and "Step Ten: Branch Out from Borscht." Within the humor, Janzen offers depictions of calamity and dark truths about regrettable relationships. Unfortunately, the closing primer on Mennonite history falls flat. A buoyant, somewhat mordant ramble through triumphs, upheavals and utter normalcy. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

WHAT is a woman in her early 40s to do when her brilliant, gorgeous, manic-depressive, verbally abusive, charming control freak of a husband of 15 years leaves her for a man named Bob, just before a drunken driver gives her so many broken bones that she has to inch down stairs on her backside? In Rhoda Janzen's wonderfully intelligent and frank memoir, she goes home to the Mennonites. Janzen, the author of a poetry collection called "Babel's Stair," teaches English and creative writing at Hope College in Michigan. Those aren't promising details, I know - readers may suspect that an academic poet's memoir about failed marriage, debilitating pain and a strict religious upbringing would be dry, self-pitying and overly earnest. But "Mennonite in a Little Black Dress" is snort-up-your-coffee funny, breezy yet profound, and poetic without trying. In fact, the whole book reads as if Janzen had dictated it to her best non-Menno friend, in her bathrobe, over cups of tea. Nothing much happens here, plotwise. While Janzen is healing both physically and emotionally, she returns to California to stay with her parents - a handsome, preachy father who's "the Mennonite equivalent of the pope," and a resolutely cheery, unapologetically flatulent mother who, as a nurse, is as open about bodily functions as her daughter is about emotions. They celebrate Christmas with Janzen's beautiful younger sister, Hannah, weed out the closets, play Scrabble and cook. (Apparently, all Mennonite women can cook: "Dinner for 10 an hour from now? No problem.") Also in California, Janzen dates a couple of mildly inappropriate men: a Christian rocker who wears a nail around his neck and a Mennonite cutie 17 years her junior. She talks to her closest friends and appreciates them deeply. She visits senior citizens with her mother, bearing jam and Zwieback. And she thinks, a lot - about her marriage, what it means to be Mennonite, who the members of her eccentric, varied family really are. She remembers the horrors of childhood camping trips, a terrible teacher, the Mennonite boy she briefly dated who's haunted her dreams evermore. In the end, she realizes both that you really can go home again and that her Mennonite upbringing has provided her with everything she needs to weather this crisis: a sense of humor; a strong predilection for stoicism, honesty, hard work and good cheer; an appreciation for community; and an unwillingness to blame other people for anything - even cruel ex-husbands and teenagers who drink and drive. "I had plenty of time to wonder if I had somehow been complicit in my own accident," she writes. "Had I had time to swerve and failed? Had my misery pulled Curtis's Jeep Cherokee down on me? Was I a magnet of self-pity?" Janzen also dissects her marriage with admirable and courageous self-knowledge. She takes full responsibility for staying with a man who didn't love her, for tolerating and kowtowing to his impossible standards. Through the entire book, I never once doubted that a woman with this degree of fortitude and self-reliance would be all right. "Mennonite in a Little Black Dress" is loose and gossipy, organic and unhurried without losing control. It has "a real nice shape," to use a compliment one matchmaker applies to Janzen herself. The book's star is undoubtedly Janzen's mother, Mary - a woman with near total resistance to depression, fatigue and negativity, who rejects puritanical attitudes toward matters of the body. (Most of them, anyway: Mennonites do not seem to discuss sex much, although the existence of so many children suggests they're not unfamiliar with the subject.) Mary welcomes her divorced, broken-boned, nonreligious, academic daughter back with open arms, without judgment, castigation or undue coddling. She sings endless songs, each odder and funnier than the last, fills a freezer with mini-jars of strawberry jam to take to the elderly and suggests calmly, in line one day at Circuit City, that Janzen should marry her cousin Waldemar, who it happens is also a professor. ("Wally is my first cousin," Janzen reminds her. "That's both incestuous and illegal." The women then engage in a conversation about the relative merits of marrying a pothead versus a man with a tractor.) Janzen has clearly inherited her mother's gift for emotional generosity and tolerance. She laughs lovingly at the oddities of her conservative upbringing, the horrible "shame-based" lunches she and her siblings were forced to take to school in diaper bags, the strict ethical and behavioral standards she was held to until she was old enough to flee. She takes us on a hilarious tour of Mennonite cuisine: borscht "looks and smells like milk gone bad," with a "lingering afterwhiff" of soldiers' socks, while a typical sandwich is made from ketchup, homemade bread and salty little meatballs called cotletten, each "pungent saltball" of which "assumes a jellied viscosity, heavy as a puck." Janzen is as sharp about the cognoscenti and academics she now lives among as she is about Mennonites and her family's eccentricities. Her tone reminds me of Garrison Keillor's deadpan, affectionate, slightly hyperbolic stories about urbanites and Minnesota Lutherans, and also of the many Jewish writers who've brought mournful humor to the topics of gefilte fish and their own mothers, as well as to the secular, often urban, often intellectual world they call home now. It's the narrative voice of the person who grew up in an ethnic religious community, escaped it, then looked back with clearsighted objectivity and appreciation. IF Janzen is a bit too persistent in mentioning that her husband ditched her for "a guy named Bob from Gay.com," well, she's understandably shell-shocked. My bigger quibble is that she learns during the course of her visit home that her mother almost left her father, not once but a couple of times - yet this fascinating, telling, surprising piece of information is passed over without comment or elaboration. I wanted to know exactly when and why this happened. Mennonites don't typically divorce: a culture that frowns on dancing in high school isn't going to look kindly on the breakup of a marriage. And Janzen's parents are so conservative, so traditional and religious, it's hard to imagine Mary even contemplating such a thing, let alone telling her daughter about it. Maybe Janzen wanted to protect her parents' privacy, but more details here would not only have shed greater light on her own upbringing and life, but also rounded out her loving, appreciative, unsentimental portrait of her mother. But these are tiny things. I loved this book, and Rhoda Janzen. She is a terrific, pithy, beautiful writer, a reliable, sympathetic narrator and a fantastically good sport. I hope she becomes rich and successful and falls madly in love with her first cousin Waldemar. Madam, your tractor is waiting. Janzen's Mennonite upbringing gives her what she needs to weather an emotional and physical crisis. Kate Christensen is the author, most recently, of the novel "Trouble."

Forty was not fabulous to poet and professor Janzen (Babel's Stair). In the same week, she was dumped by her husband for Bob, the guy from Gay.com, and suffered an injury in a car accident. Our devastated author did the logical thing and headed back home to her parent's house and the conservative Mennonite community in which she was raised. This soulful, affecting first memoir renders a potentially off-putting subject-the Mennonite community in America-engrossing and will enchant anyone who has ever gone back home after suffering a setback. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 6/1/09.] Readalike: Sarah Thyre's Dark at the Roots.-Elizabeth Brinkley, Granite Falls, WA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

At first, the worst week of Janzen's life-she gets into a debilitating car wreck right after her husband leaves her for a guy he met on the Internet and saddles her with a mortgage she can't afford-seems to come out of nowhere, but the disaster's long buildup becomes clearer as she opens herself up. Her 15-year relationship with Nick had always been punctuated by manic outbursts and verbally abusive behavior, so recognizing her co-dependent role in their marriage becomes an important part of Janzen's recovery (even as she tweaks the 12 steps just a bit). The healing is further assisted by her decision to move back in with her Mennonite parents, prompting her to look at her childhood religion with fresh, twinkling eyes. (She provides an appendix for those unfamiliar with Mennonite culture, as well as a list of "shame-based foods" from hot potato salad to borscht.) Janzen is always ready to gently turn the humor back on herself, though, and women will immediately warm to the self-deprecating honesty with which she describes the efforts of friends and family to help her re-establish her emotional well-being. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Janzen was raised in a strict Mennonite society, and while she upheld the values as a child and maintained her faith even as an adult, she couldn't help but rebel. However, after marrying an emotionally abusive atheist who leaves her for a man he met on Gay.com, and then barely surviving a terrible car accident, Janzen finds herself back home reliving her Mennonite childhood as an adult. In her compelling memoir, Janzen explores her past and her present with honesty and self-deprecation, and the result is both hilarious and touching. She delves into her relationships with her mother, sister, and ex-husband without holding back, and she explores some of the Mennonite traditions that helped shape her life. No prior knowledge of Mennonite culture is necessary for enjoying and learning from this lively chronicle of the patience and strong sense of humor one needs to go home again.--Orphan, Claire Copyright 2009 Booklist