At first glance it looks like you could make a female buddy flick out of Joanna Goodman’s first novel Belle of the Bayou. You know the kind of movie: a sort of funny “Thelma and Louise” with a happy ending.

The problem is that the heroine’s side-kick is her 12-year-old son, and instead of making an existential leap into the void, she jumps into the arms of a jazz musician 30 years her senior. Despite some great moments and an intriguing premise, the story gets bogged down in its laugh track. It begins as Arabella Slominski Boot discovers her husband in bed with her best friend. Not that she loves him much – they haven’t had sex in four months – but she is furious at his betrayal and at the way she’s been treated by men. Cursed with a magnificent bosom, she has spent all her life trying to live down her lush body.

Just turned 40, she knows the time has come to liberate herself. So she packs up her son Kenny and heads to Lafayette, Louisiana where her mother lives. In no time at all Arabella is working as a copy editor on a small newspaper.

Her mother is still working too – at the “Home of the Oldest Topless Waitress on the Bayou.” The old lady (whose reconstructed breasts are the only perky thing about her) is also trying to kill off her even older and very rich third husband by slipping cleaning products into his milkshakes. “I only put a teensy bit, to clean out his system,” she says. “…What’s a little Liquid Plumm’r gonna do? I call it Youth in Asia.”

At the newspaper, the editor plays John Denver songs on his guitar in the newsroom, tries to look down Ara’s cleavage, and sends her to review an Indian restaurant called “The Cajun Delhi.” She resists his advances,tries a voodoo revenge on her estranged husband, and falls madly in love with a black saxophonist.

Needless to say, the road to true love doesn’t run smooth. It gets there though and ends with Ara set to win big. Though by then the reader may have grown tired of the jokes and begun to wonder why Goodman creates a supposedly liberated woman who has such a thing about old men.