Red Dress Ink has offered a surprisingly witty and literary work in Hubbard’s take on the life of a struggling writer forced to move back home and to take on clients as a professional housecleaner. Protagonist Lisa Marie supplements her household toil by writing an anonymous advice column for the New Sparta Other. Both manual tasks reveal a paper trail which leads to discovering unsigned semi-pornographic letters, political corruption, gender-bending expeditions to Florida, and cross-dressing novelists who enact English royalty.

The novel is sprinkled with literary references to the classics and books of etiquette: she samples from Samuel Beckett and Marjoris Hillis’ 1930s feminist treatises, citing “The woman always pays in a thousand little shabbinesses.” Hubbard’s prose has a resilient quality, lucidly depicting a vivid heroine who is a bit Nancy Drew and a bit Margery Kempe.

Not unlike the other fare from Red Dress Ink, Lisa Marie’s Guide for the Perplexed contains elements the romance of the chick lit pervading our booksellers; however, in her attention to detail, Hubbard weaves a modern love story pickled in sarcasm, marinated in disillusion, and expelled from a vacuum of dissolution.

Her story culminates in an Atlantis-like scene, a denouement of destruction in Anytown, Middle America: “The carousel that was one of the mall’s icons that had been bisected by two metal poles which formerly supported a banner Shop Till You Drop. Two carousel ponies had been thrown through the window of the nearby By Gum It’s Monday restaurant, and the air was thick with the odor of burned French fries and frankfurters.” Hubbard’s work fuses the mundane of daily life with the sinister secrets which lurk beneath the bound guise of business attire.