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"Frucht, Abby"
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A well-made bed
\"When do-gooder Noor and frumpy home-schooled Jaycee find in Jaycee's luggage a cheese stuffed with drugs that she has unwittingly smuggled home from Peru, greed overcomes good instincts, and soon the unlikely pair are breaking bad in Vermont. Noor, a therapeutic riding instructor, and Jaycee, daughter of a plagiarizing children's book author who has insisted on raising her as though it's still 1860, discover that they have more than selling drugs in common, including Gerry Wilcox, a sexy slacker admirer of Noor's, recruited to find them a connection. Ugly secrets, including the truth about the death of a childhood friend, some outrageous revelations about Jaycee's increasingly enfeebled parents, and Noor's burgeoning doubts about her marriage and motherhood, come to light as Jaycee and Noor make tentative strides toward a less prickly, though still lopsided friendship. A road trip to Miami in pursuit of more drugs brings them face to face with their capacity for betrayal, and a caper becomes a calamity. Darkly comic and beautifully rendered, A WELL-MADE BED goes beyond the tropes of the buddy tale to explore just how easily each of us might step over the line from being a clean-nosed good citizen to being a felon.\"-- Provided by publisher.
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Warm-weather selections Getting to the heart of the matter; Elinor Lipman's new seriocomic novel about death, loyalty and family secrets
The suggestion that [Fletcher Finn] and [Sunny] are long-lost half- siblings is most flagrantly made by Fletcher's, Sunny's and [Miles]' hair--\"a halo of prematurely gray hair of a beautiful shade and an identical satiny, flyaway texture\"-- but that's not enough proof for Sunny, who finds the prospect of a brother, in particular the ill- mannered Fletcher, a distasteful, embarrassing subject. Her putative father left home years ago, casting Sunny and [Margaret Batten] into a convenient widowed state, allowing them practically rent-free domicile in a house at the edge of the ever-inviting golf course, along with the kind of charitable respect accorded proper, abandoned females. The bereaved Sunny finds this dent in her mother's upright history--that is, that Margaret fooled around with Miles--an affront to her modesty. As Sunny puts it:
Newspaper Article
Remembering Madoff, Without The Bull
Frucht talks about ABC's miniseries \"Madoff\" and HBO's \"The Wizard of Lies,\" shows that follow the rise and abrupt downfall of former investment adviser, Bernard Madoff. She also shares how Madoff's Ponzi scheme affected her family.
Newspaper Article
Quotes: BOOK REVIEW THE STORY OF A
Marcy Bunkleman is 15 years old when 41-year-old Robert, husband of her mother's best - and apparently only - friend, invites her to begin \"an adventure.\" Marcy understands that Robert's invitation is sexual. They begin an affair that lasts a year, during which Marcy, a high school track star, must conceal her daily visits to the lakeview apartment that Robert had rented for their encounters. \"When you go into a room with one other person and lock the door behind you, you are momentarily free of every principle by which people ordinarily speak and act with each other ... You may legislate as you wish,\" declares Marcy from a distance of decades, her tone deliberately subdued as if in deference to the curious detachment she used to feel around Robert, whose inappropriate age she \"hadn't paid much attention to\" until she ended the affair and began dating a boy at school. Then, Robert's age became associated, in the young girl's mind, with a sadness so inescapable that much of her ongoing story, relating her ascent into and beyond middle age, involves her attempts to break free of it.
Newspaper Article
THE WORSE FOR WEAR JEAN THOMPSON'S COMPASSIONATE STORIES ABOUT CHARACTERS WHO ARE LOSERS AT LIFE
`Who Do You Love\" is Jean Thompson's third collection of stories, many of which have appeared in the nation's preeminent magazines and literary journals. Honored by inclusion in both the Pushcart Prize and \"Best American Short Stories\" anthologies, these cautiously despairing, quietly respectful glimpses into the lives of an assortment of characters call to mind a lot of what is to be celebrated, but also what might soon grow wearisome, in contemporary North American short fiction.
Newspaper Article
Evil Spirits Stole Her Soul / An immigrant family's encounter with western medicine
\"The Hmong have a phrase . . . `to speak of all kinds of things,' \" Fadiman was told, and she herself assimilated the concept. In her tale of Nao Kao, his wife Foua and their desperately ill daughter Lia Lee, she calls on such a vast array of experiences and disciplines that her tale of one immigrant family's encounter with the American medical establishment is nothing short of encyclopedic. But Fadiman is a remarkable journalist, in whose hands an abundance of disparate material comes together in a deeply humane anthropological document written with the grace of a lyric and the suspense of a thriller. The stubborn history of the Hmong in Southeast Asia, their involvement with the Americans in Vietnam, their refugee status in Thailand and migration to the United States from their home in the mountains of Laos are only part of this riveting story's background. We are shown that, for the Hmong, conventional western distinctions between mind and body, medicine and religion do not hold. And we learn that the flight of the soul from the body is a principal cause of illness, that to the Hmong, epilepsy is a spiritual display elevating the patient to shamanistic status. Details of Hmong domestic and ritual life are related in such a way as to evoke the larger social and historical context in which they occurred. While Lia's case \"confirmed the Hmong community's worst prejudices about the medical profession and the medical community's worst prejudices about the Hmong,\" it also gave rise to Fadiman's spirited telling of the sweltering day Foua dressed her in Hmong wedding finery.
Newspaper Article
NEW NOVEL IS LESS THAN ALL RIGHT
Like \"Accidents in the Home,\" this novel, set in England, burdens its heroines with the company of dull, self-satisfied men. Here, [Joyce]'s husband, Ray, is the anxious artist, and Zoe's Simon the aggrieved intellectual. And like \"Accidents,\" this book situates us in a world whose social and cultural fashions are carefully witnessed and smartly portrayed. But however astute [Tessa Hadley Holt]'s portrait of 1950s boarding schools and early 21st-century academe, however carefully she limns Simon's asceticism, Ray's vulnerable ego, [Zoe]'s naivete, and Pearl's rebelliousness, nothing ever quite comes to pass. Sure, people come of age, endure, mess up, and go bravely on. But if the effect of Hadley's earlier book was of immersing oneself in a moving, breathing episode, the effect here is of watching a giant mural scroll past, and of waiting, to no avail, for the busy timeline to pause at whatever moment might make the wait worthwhile.
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