Momzillas

January 1, 2007
Kargman is no worse off without writing partner Carrie Karasyov (The Right Address
; Wolves in Chic Clothing
) in her first solo novel, a breezy jaunt through the Manhattan nursery grinder. Recently relocated to the Upper East Side from San Francisco after her husband, Josh, took a lucrative job, Hannah Allen is thrown into the mommy snake pit by her domineering mother-in-law, Lila Allen Dillingham, who introduces Hannah to a cabal of neighborhood moms led by the "drop dead gorgissima" Bee Elliott. Hannah, a black-jeans-and-Converse art history grad and mother of too-cute two-year-old Violet, struggles to please Lila and keep up with Bee's hypercompetitive crew of "Kelly-bag-toting, Chanel-suit-wearing, Bugaboo-pushing sharks" who fret over their children's head circumferences and admissions into pre-preschools with three-year waiting lists. There's no shortage of name-dropping and light humor as Hannah struggles to win a co-op board's approval, keep her marriage afloat and get Violet into Carnegie Nursery School. Though a bevy of "awky" abbreviations litter the narrative ("unfortch" "sitch," "actsch"), Kargman writes with verve. Fans of the genre won't be disappointed.

February 15, 2007
When Hannah Allen's husband's job brings them from San Francisco to Manhattan, she's ill prepared for life as a Park Avenue mother. In this land of elite pre-preschools, pacifier consultants, and children's birthday parties held in hotel ballrooms, gossip and competitive bragging are the pastimes of choice. Hannah finds herself struggling to feel at home and make new friends, and jabs from her snobby mother-in-law aren't helping matters. Kargman offers a voyeuristic view of the good life and its bad side in a novel that is entertaining but also insubstantial, peppered with pop-culture references and enough lingo and cute abbreviations to necessitate a glossary. However, " Momzillas "does mark the rise of a new trend in contemporary fiction: mom lit. Building on the success of tot-filled tomes like " The Nanny Diaries" (2002) and " Little" " Earthquakes" (2004), the fiction of singledom is giving way to the fiction of motherhood, and readers are snapping these books up.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2007, American Library Association.)