The Matzo Ball Heiress

March 15, 2004
Heather Greenblotz is the most down-to-earth heiress you're ever likely to meet. She's got a chilly, self-centered and travel-obsessed mother and a warm, self-centered and gay father; her cousin Jake, a real trooper, runs the family business, Greenblotz Matzo; her cousins Marcy and Rebecca are covetous and litigious. Shapiro, author of ALA Notable Book The Unexpected Salami
, deftly manages to keep her heroine above the fray: while Heather may be angry at her relatives, she is never bitter. But what's an heiress—albeit a very nice and hardworking one—to do when she discovers that the family business is in financial trouble and only she can save the day? Why, she throws together a last-minute Passover seder to be broadcast by the Food Channel. The only problem is that the cantankerous Greenblotz clan doesn't celebrate Passover. In a highly improbable sequence of events, Heather and her kosher heartthrob, cameraman Jared Silver, attempt to pull off the seder of the year, attended by, among others, a stoned intern, Heather's father's gay lover, the official spokesman for the Egyptian consulate and a young woman with the unfortunate surname of Hitler. There is plenty of humor in this novel, and while some of it flirts with slapstick, Shapiro rescues her characters' dignity, sometimes hauling them out of the abyss at the last moment. Heather's likable personality and work as an award-winning documentarian also help her to "keep it real," even as she trips along toward the inevitable happy ending of this amusing, irreverent novel.