We first met Shannon Olson—our semi-fictional heroine—in the witty and engaging Welcome to My Planet. Olson pioneered a daring new genre, a kind of fictional documentary, pulling no punches by using her own name, and engaging readers with her wry and direct style. In Children of God, Shannon is in her mid-thirties and besieged by reminders that her life doesn’t look much at all like the American Dream, nor like her aquarium-stocking, furniture-buying peers. She embarks upon a self-improvement campaign, joining group therapy, blind dating, and trying to convince herself to fall in love with an old college chum. Shannon even gives organized religion a go. With encore performances by Flo (called “one of the great moms of American fiction” by Garrison Keillor), this is the hilarious and poignant tale of a woman making her life happen when it didn’t quite happen for her.