Swell

April 17, 2017
Eisenstadt’s (From Rockaway) detailed and eclectic novel takes readers to a dilapidated oceanfront house full of secrets, ghosts, and an old woman’s cast-off tchotchkes. In the wake of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the Glassmans move from their small, suddenly uninhabitable Tribeca apartment with their two daughters (and one on the way) to a Rockaway beach house, bought for them by Sue Glassman’s father-in-law, Sy. To Sue’s chagrin, this is on the condition that Sy move in with them—and that Sue convert to Judaism. Moreover, the house is falling apart and full of the prior owner’s possessions. Rose, an elderly Italian lady, shows up at their doorstep in a wheelchair demanding her house back and her garden restored. She spends multiple afternoons sitting in the Glassmans’ garden, accusing them of conspiring to swindle her. Heavily pregnant, Sue wants nothing more than to be rid of the pesky former owner and her old junk. But the more Sue learns about Rose and the house, the more she comes to see how intertwined the two really are. In this touching portrait of ordinary people grappling with the aftershocks of 9/11—memorials, uncertainty, death, and a new life—the emotional upheaval of a national tragedy leaves no one unaffected.

April 1, 2017
In the immediate wake of 9/11, a young family uproots their lives in Manhattan to resettle in a ramshackle Rockaway beach house--and, over the course of one momentous weekend, finds a whole lot more drama than they bargained for.Desperate for a new place to live and short on cash, Dan and Sue Glassman are vulnerable when Dan's curmudgeonly father, Sy, makes them an offer too convenient to refuse: if Sue, now pregnant with the couple's third child, will finally convert to Judaism, Sy will buy the family a beach house in Rockaway, with the controversial caveat that he'll also live there. And this time, though she has resisted conversion for years, Sue acquiesces: "Blame hormones or love or the post-terror downtown stench, but moving suddenly seemed like the only option." But the house comes with baggage of its own, and when the previous owner, Rose--a plucky 90-year-old who, less than a decade earlier, got away with (literal) murder in the dining room--wheels up to the front door the weekend of Sue's conversion party and refuses to leave, the family's best-laid plans are thrown into chaos. If Rose is telling the truth, the house has been sold without her consent; if she isn't, the fact remains that they still have to figure out what to do with the geriatric force of nature squatting on the premises. But while they don't know it, the Glassmans have something of an unlikely guardian in their next-door neighbor Tim Ray, a divorced ex-firefighter with half a nose who's haunted by the mistakes of his booze-soaked past and feels an inexplicable attachment to the family. With tremendous tenderness, Eisenstadt (Kiss Out, 1991, etc.) captures the traumatized Rockaway of the early 2000s in swirling Technicolor, though her zany and colorful characters never quite manage to transcend their laundry lists of quirks to become fully human. But what the novel lacks in nuance, it makes up in heart. A whimsical portrait of a still-raw community that mostly hits the mark.

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May 15, 2017
In Eisenstadt's follow-up to her much earlier From Rockaway (1987), we're back at the beach with some of the same characters. The previous book was a coming-of-age story about the lives of young people in Rockaway looking for direction. This time those characters are older, dealing with very different kinds of issues, some personal, others driven by current events; the book opens with a boatload of illegal Chinese aliens landing on Rockaway Beach in 1993 and moves on to the effects of 9/11 and Hurricane Sandy. Matriarch Rose Impolitari is at the center of the novel; after a brief hiatus at an assisted-care facility elsewhere in Queens, she returns to Rockaway, and her presence impacts the rest of the cast, including pregnant Sue Glassman, whose decision to convert to Judaism leads to a conversion party that is one of the book's fine set pieces. With a pitch-perfect narrative voice and plenty of humor, Eisenstadt captures the lives of her Mets-loving and Yankee-hating characters in vivid detail.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)