In the space of a few hours, thirty-year-old Ginger Petrocelli had gone from bride-to-be to bride-who-never-was. So here she sat, alone in her cramped apartment, wedding crinolines askew, drowning her sorrows in a hundred-dollar bottle of Veuve Cliquot, when her doorbell rang. And her trip to hell in a handbasket was about to escalate.

At the door: Nick, Ginger’s “first.” Only, he’s a police officer now, and he wants to find out what she knows about her M.I.A. congressman fiancé. When was the last time she’d seen him? She’d better not leave town….And the spiral continues: her cozy little sublet (really, she liked having her shower in the kitchen) isabout to be yanked away, and the prestigious little design firm where she works is about to go belly-up. So what’s a girl to do?

Her answer, born of desperation: move in with her crazy, widowed mother—who Ginger claims sucks the life force out of every creature within one city block of her—and her grandmother, who spends much of her day engaged in heated arguments with her dead husband.

Well, it’s a plan. But bizarrely, as the summer progresses, her eccentric but lovable relatives give her the courage to make choices based on what she wants, not what she wants to avoid.