Word Salad: A Novel

Matilda loves logic and order, and now her structured world is falling apart—in a bookstore.

Former economics major Matilda is moving back to her hometown of Washington D.C. to care for her ailing mother, and she's desperate for money. She takes a job at her neighborhood bookstore and tries, in vain, to make sense of illogical business of books. To make things worse, she's forced to team up with a new hire—the enigmatic, flaky, larger-than-life, Sage—who shows up on her first day of work with zero administrative skills and her tiny, puffy, incessantly urinating dog that resembles an underfed rat.

Something in the chaos begins to remind Matilda of her long-neglected creative side, and she starts to rediscover the person she once was before so much got in the way. But things get even more unmanageable when Matilda and Sage are tasked with putting together an event for the reclusive and controversial Dr. Jordan Rutabaga, a windbag of a public intellectual with a cult following that includes a number of people who would like to literally and figuratively see him dead. Rutabaga has a long list of alleged misdeeds, from plagiarism to failure to pay child support to stiffing the nanny.

As the event date approaches, Matilda and Sage discover that Sage and Rutabaga have their own not uncomplicated past, adding yet another person to list of people who do not wish him well. Add in a lawsuit and an impending snowstorm along with the potentially sinister presence of Rutabaga himself, and Matilda is about to come undone.

Bestselling author Susan Coll's gastric, bookish, laugh-out-loud comedy of manners reminds us that sometimes things have to completely fall apart for them to perfectly come together.