Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas

October 30, 1995
Robbins's latest tells of a Seattle commodities broker whose life is abruptly changed by a wild weekend with a handful of eccentrics.

June 15, 1994
This latest from Robbins, whose ability to "mix tomfoolery and philosophy" is unparalleled (Skinny Legs and All, LJ 3/1/90), will surely be high on patrons' wish lists this fall. Five previous novels by the wacky but literate writer have sold more than four million copies.

August 1, 1994
This is an extraordinarily funny novel. At first it seems gimmicky. Robbins assumes the voice--the entire persona, in fact--of a 29-year-old Filipino woman by the name of Gwen Mati, a Seattle stockbroker, who must re-assess her material and psychological resources over the course of one weekend following a Black Thursday on the stock market. But soon we fall, hook, line, and sinker into her plight; the yarn has a genuineness, a warmth, a humor, and an incredibly compelling plot, which hold our attention to the end. So, anyway, the stock market has taken a nosedive, and even though brokers themselves aren't nose-diving out of windows, there is concern in the Seattle financial community about how to repair portfolios and reputations. In the midst of this grave concern, Gwen has a Thursday-evening-to-Monday-morning lesson in the weird side of sex and the puzzlement of love. Gwen's unwitting adventures during a weekend when she needs to be concentrating on emotional repair lead her from pillar to post and one strange character to another. Robbins' style is a knockout--"How typical of your luck that when you finally arrived in a position to poach your golden eggs, the goose had a hysterectomy"--and the pace is unrelenting; but most important of all, you come to love Gwen. ((Reviewed August 1994))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1994, American Library Association.)