Everything Nice by Ellen Shanman Prickly Mike loses her job, too, when her lecherous boss Brian is fired from a prestigious ad agency. Suddenly she discovers that everyone wants team players with people skills and already knows she has neither. Soon she’s in a downward spiral, drinking too much, sneaking in to her ex’s comedy club performances to hear him rail against her, and pushing away Gunther, her only friend. Just when she’s being evicted, her father, widowed when Mike was four, announces that he’s engaged and his fiancée is moving in. The fiancée suggests that Mike ask about a job at her former place of employment, an all-girls charter school. Now she’s stuck teaching Life Skills to a terrifying group of giggling and whispering thirteen-year-olds. Mike as a character was hard to like at first, but things turned around so nicely that I couldn’t be offended at the unsurprising redemptive ending. Because sometimes a little redemption is a beautiful thing.