St. John adventure offers an amazing read

Provocative and funny memoir embraces love, loyalty and self-preservation

My Next Husband Will Be Normal

By Rae Elllen Lee

Great Blue Graphics

Paperback edition: 6x9 format, 300 pages

ISBN 978-0-9619328-5-5, $14.95

E-book: ISBN 978-0-9619328-4-8, $4.99

Is life a tragedy, comedy or just a big lesson?

Can we control our future with positive affirmations?

And what should a spouse do when she discovers, after 10 years of marriage, her husband was living the wrong gender?

These are heady questions for any memoir, but author Rae Ellen Lee tackles these topics and more with humor and insight in “ My Next Husband Will Be Normal.”

She takes readers to her adopted new home in the Virgin Islands, where she and her almost 60 year old six-foot- four husband Tom, a former Republican legislator from Montana with a crew cut, hope to embrace pre-retirement in paradise. They buy a small shop, called The Canvas Factory in St. John, where they produce and sell canvas bags to an assorted cast of customers, some of them well known celebrities. But not long after they “settle in” Tom starts a love affair with women’s clothing, which progresses to mani-pedi sessions. Then he begins taking estrogen.

Lee is a deft storyteller, recounting their days in a insulated community where “ You can do anything you wants as long as everyone knows about it.”

Adventurous readers will relish Lee’s outrageous revelations, discreet disclosures, and her take on the inevitable.

She has an exceptional talent for both description and dialogue as she shares their life in the tropics, with its many surprises. One moment she may savor a sublime sunset, another feel a lizard crawling inside her dress. Then there’s the threat of hurricanes, tarantulas and the need to embrace the requisite eccentricities of island living.

Lee also shares her marital angst, but refuses to indulge in self-pity, preferring to demonstrate how love, loyalty and self-preservation can transcend the unimaginable.

She spends considerable time discovering St. John’s natural elements. In the end she appears to also explore and accept human nature, with all its pain and promise. - Maura Curley

About Rae Ellen Lee: Rae Ellen Lee grew up on a stump ranch in northern Idaho. Her first memoir," I Only Cuss When I’m Sailing" (first published as If The Shoe Fits by Sheridan House), chronicles her move with her husband Tom in 1997 from the mountains of Montana to the West Coast to live on an a sailboat.

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For more information about Rae Elen Lee's booksvisit her website here.

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