Carpool Diem

Annie Fleming's family has always adjusted well to her hard driving career. How could they not? Annie keeps them in line at home with typed, edited, and proofed to-do and not-to-do lists for her husband, her babysitter, and her daughter. (No TV on a school night, please!) But when an obnoxious co-worker conspires to force Annie out of her job, she finds herself out of work and face-to-face with her family, who, it turns out, isn't quite as well-adjusted as Annie thought. Husband Tim doesn't have near the follow-through that Annie does (ordered to downsize his employees, he can't fire anybody!) And daughter Charlotte doesn't even try to make the local soccer team - a cut-throat, take-no-prisoners system run by Winslow West, a man who dreams of the Olympic gold his young charges will someday win for him. Here Annie is unemployed and Charlotte's the one with the quitting attitude? Annie doesn't think so. She's determined to get Charlotte on the A team (the Lightning Bolts), but finds that the soccer sidelines are more cutthroat than a boardroom ever was.

Nancy Star is a former movie exec turned novelist. She has spent at least a year of Sundays standing on the sidelines at her daughters' soccer games, but never once, in all that time, did she ever yell, "Attack", "Get her", or "Kill them."