What could be more irrelevant in New Orleans than plastic surgery? Not much, unless you think about it. Eleanor Rushing is waiting for the man who holds her attraction--and she knows he's attracted to her, too--to leave his wife. Probably she'll have to wait for the wife to die. In the meantime, she's thinking about cosmetic surgery. She met her cool and sexy surgeon. Dr. Richard Kimball, at a glittering fundraiser. She's smitten. She will play Galatea to his Pygmalion. But it is the summer of 2005 and Hurricane Katrina interrupts Eleanor's transformation. Undeterred, she tracks Richard down in Houston, determined to have more surgery. This time the result is hideous. She returns to a New Orleans as wrecked as her body. Neither will ever be the same. In the end, both the reader and Eleanor understand that transformation is probably the most difficult image to process--especially when change has been wrought by someone or something beyond our control. A tragicomic novel, A Little Bit Ruined exposes the damaged and tenuously intact faces of New Orleans.