Likable, lightweight and meant to appeal to the very people Galant is semi-satirizing.
In her second genial lampoon of New Jersey life, Galant (Rattled, 2006) takes aim at new-age suburbanites and the national obsession with climate change, among other targets.
The same day that Nina’s newly opened yoga studio floods, her husband Michael’s job as a meteorologist at Newark Airport is outsourced to the Philippines. Nina, a yoga teacher on anti-depressants, turns to feng shui to rid home and business of bad spirits. Soon one disaster follows another. Michael comes under Homeland Security surveillance for studying cloud formations in the Newark Airport parking lot. Nina’s attempt to hide Michael’s job loss from her judgmental mother Belle falters when Belle decides that she and Nina’s father Max should visit to avoid a Florida hurricane. Flying north separately due to a lack of seat availability, Max loses his luggage and his identification, then is mistaken for a crazy homeless person. While at Newark to bring Max home, Michael comes back under Homeland Security radar. Taken into custody at gunpoint, he is interrogated and held in isolation. Meanwhile, Michael and Nina’s son Adam, an eighth grader, attends Lisa Epstein’s outsized bat mitzvah and decides that he wants a bar mitzvah of his own. After all, he’s half Jewish, even if he is being raised as a Unitarian, part of Nina’s attempt to escape her Jewish Princess past. Enticed by Lisa, Adam commits a naughty prank against a teacher and is reprimanded. Shaken, he meets with a Hasidic rabbi who invites Adam and his family to Shabbat dinner. With Michael missing and her business floundering, Nina loses it at the rabbi’s house and says “the F-word.” And the hurricane has followed Nina’s parents north. Although Galant pulls some of her punches and her characters slide toward stereotypes, this family’s troubles escalate in an oddly believable fashion.
Likable, lightweight and meant to appeal to the very people Galant is semi-satirizing.Pub Date: March 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-312-36725-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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