基本信息出版社：St. Martin's Griffin
页码：288 页
出版日期：2005年08月
ISBN：0312324995
International Standard Book Number：0312324995
条形码：9780312324995
EAN：9780312324995
装帧：平装
正文语种：英语

内容简介

From the bestselling author of Jane Austen in Boca, “another witty tale that combines classic literature with contemporary social comedy.”---Hartford Courant

Carla Goodman’s life in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, is a little bit stressful these days. Her doctor husband is frazzled, her son’s teachers say he needs Ritalin, and she’s in the throes of planning her daughter’s bat mitzvah. But it’s her sweet widowed mother, Jessie Kaplan, who really has Carla worried, for Jessie has suddenly “remembered” that she was Shakespeare’s Dark Lady of the Sonnets in a previous life. Can even the famed Dr. Leonard Samuels, psychiatrist and author of the self-help book, How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love My Mother-in-Law, help with a problem like this?

Witty, engaging, and wickedly observant, Much Ado About Jessie Kaplan is an unpredictable tale of love, loss, and family rites of passage.

作者简介

Paula Marantz Cohen is a Distinguished Professor of English at Drexel University in Philadelphia, and the author of Jane Austen in Boca as well as five scholarly nonfiction books. She lives in Moorestown, New Jersey.

媒体推荐

“Though Cohen’s knack for gentle satire earns some terrific laughs, this buoyant novel’s power stems from the author’s deep sympathy for her conventional characters. She mocks, yes, but from a place of tremendous understanding.”
---Newsday

文摘 Carla Goodman was worried.

She knew she had much to be thankful for: a nice home, a good marriage, two beautiful children. She even had a close relationship with her mother, whom her husband actually liked.

But lately, there were problems.

First, her husband was coming home from work frazzled and depressed. A gastroenterologist in private practice, he should have been free from worries about making a living. But medicine wasn't what it used to be. "It's one thing to look up butts and get rich," Mark complained wearily. "It's another to do it for nickels and dimes."

Then there was Jeffrey, their ten-year-old, on his way to becoming a fifth-grade delinquent. Each week, Jeffrey's backpack released an avalanche of notes from his teachers. "Dear Mrs. Goodman," one recent note read, "Your son's poking of the girls with pencils is unacceptable. Please apprise him of the dangers of lead poisoning and the fact that several of his victims' parents are lawyers."

If this weren't enough, there was Stephanie, aged twelve, who existed in what seemed to Carla like a perpetual state of PMS. Stephanie's bat mitzvah was only months away, but the unpredictability of her moods-which often revolved around whether she was having a good or a bad hair day-meant planning this event required the tactical insight and diplomacy of a seasoned military strategist.

But these were all everyday problems, part of the expected stresses and strains of life. The business with her mother was another story. Carla found it confusing, disturbing, even (truth be told) scary.

She had noticed the first sign that something was wrong one evening a few months after her mother had moved in with them. The afternoon of that day had been uneventful-which is to say, no more nerve-wracking than usual. She and Stephanie had spent several hours fighting in a stationery store in an upscale strip mall on Route 73 in Ch
……