The Goddess Lounge — Margaret Finnegan

Penne Armour's bad day just keeps getting worse. First, she has to visit The Goddess Lounge, the notorious LA coffee house/knitting salon/menstrual palace decried by religious conservatives as a “man-hating elevator to hell.” Then, she learns that her “inner goddess” is Venus, the goddess of love, the one goddess -- if she believed in goddesses -- that divorced-mom Penne would want nothing to do with. But when her ex-husband goes missing and she sets out to find him, maybe Venus is just what Penne needs to face down a one-eyed fashionista, a boar-taming olive-oil rancher, a hypnotic lounge lizard, an ocean of traffic, and her own increasingly irrepressible feelings for a businessman with a dangerous secret. A comic yet thoughtful riff on Homer's Odyssey, The Goddess Lounge asks the eternal question: Why be a hero when you can be a goddess?