Shortly before her death in October 1992 Laurie Colwin completed her novel A Big Storm Knocked It Over. She had spent an idyllic summer writing, and the pleasure she took in it lends a radiance to every page of this book, her most deeply felt and enchanting exploration of how men and women stubbornly stake their claims to love - romantic, familial, and between friends - in a world that often seems to do its best to thwart it. Rather late into her thirties, Jane Louise Parker has just gotten married - and to a man whose native decency leaves her almost breathless at her good fortune. Teddy's inclination to occasional brooding silences is really only a small flaw, and Jane Louise always has the distraction of her work as a book designer in a small and very tony publishing house - even if her job all too often seems to involve avoiding becoming the latest conquest of the firm's lewdly charming art director. With her best friend, the flamboyantly talented (and dressed), interracially involved Edie, Jane Louise patiently waits to become pregnant, wondering all the while if a baby will supply the rootedness that still seems to elude her. When that longed-for child makes its appearance, it brings a transformation of the Parkers' lives that is as unexpected as it is rapturous, and provides Laurie Colwin with an ideal opportunity to apply her characteristic wit and intelligence to the dizzying experience of motherhood - and to the more unusual forms of families we make for ourselves - in the late twentieth century. A poignant farewell from a much-loved writer, A Big Storm Knocked It Over reminds us again of the singular pleasures afforded by the novel of manners - and of the rare gifts that Laurie Colwin brought to it. The mysteries of married life and the vagaries of one's own family and one's spouse's family are topics Colwin skillfully illuminates in a posthumously published novel. For Jane Louise, even Teddy--her wonderful, new, rock-solid husband--and a baby on the way are not enough to stave off plenty of free-floating anxiety. Luckily, she shares her joy and her distress with best friends Edie and Mokie, who have decided to embark on parenthood at the same time. The extended family formed by these two couples must suffice emotionally for each of the four individuals, since not one of the four fits within his or her own family. Colwin's radiant cast of characters populates a warm and witty story full of perfect moments. This very touching, very contemporary tale of love in the 1990s is certain to be popular. Alice Joyce Colwin's recent death, at a grievously young age, removed one of the fresher, sunnier, funnier, smarter novelists from the scene; this posthumous and fifth novel, though hardly her best, makes you remember that painfully. Jean Louise is a 30-ish book designer for a New York publishing house, regularly hit on by her rakish boss Sven and confused by the disloyalties of her female co-workers--yet she's essentially blissful thanks to her marriage to calm, unanxious chemist Teddy. She has a wonderful best friend, too--Edie, a caterer, who with her black husband Mokie replicates Jean Louise's contentment pretty much down the line. Jean Louise's problem is that at base she feels herself hardly deserving of such happiness- -not for anything she's done, but because of the skeptical, hard-on-herself person she just generally is. When she gives birth to a child, Miranda, the wry joy is only intensified. But a part of her still wonders whether she wouldn't be more temperamentally suited to hopping into bed with Sven the rou‚ and suffering the consequences luxuriously. Everything you expect in a Colwin novel is here--Jean-Louise and Edie, plus their spouses, seem like updates, in fact, of the delightful, too-good-to-be-true pair of couples that roamed through Colwin's best novel, Happy All the Time (1978)--and all that's missing is drama, some wrinkling that might leave any of the characters somewhat different or changed at the end from what they were at the beginning. The lack of architectural tone makes the book read like a series of skits, set-pieces, all feeling a bit skimpy, abridged. Still, Colwin's many fans will savor the willfulness, wisdom, and the sharp-eyed noticings here. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.