by Jill Ciment
Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Mar 2015
192 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
It's the summer of 2015, Brooklyn. The city is sweltering from another record-breaking heat wave, this one accompanied by biblical rains. Edith, recently retired legal librarian, and her identical twin sister, Kat, a feckless romantic who's mistaken her own eccentricity for originality, discover something ominous in their hall closet: it seems to be phosphorescent; it's a mushroom ... and it's sprouting from their wall.
Upstairs, their landlady, Vida Cebu, a Shakespearian actress far more famous for her TV commercials for Ziberax (the first female sexual enhancement pill) than for her stage work, discovers that a petite Russian girl, a runaway au pair, has been secretly living in her guest-room closet. When the police arrest the intruder, they find a second mushroom, also glowing, under the intruder's bedding. Soon the HAZMAT squad arrives, and the four women are forced to evacuate the contaminated row house with only the clothes on their backs.
As the mold infestation spreads from row house to high-rise, and frightened, bewildered New Yorkers wait out this plague (is it an act of God?) on their city and property, the four women become caught up in a centrifugal nightmare.
Part horror story, part screwball comedy, Jill Ciment's brilliant suspense novel looks at what happens when our lives - so seemingly set and ordered, yet so precariously balanced - break down in the wake of calamity. A novel, as well, about love (familial and profound) and how it can appear from the most unlikely circumstances.
"Starred Review. This absorbing novel about a luminescent fungus affixes itself to your psyche like a spore and quickly spreads to your heart, setting everything in its wake aglow." - Kirkus
"This quick read is generally humorous and lighthearted in tone, despite the trauma it conveys. Though guilty of some nasty and unethical behavior, all the characters are able to achieve redemption by the end, which Ciment manages to achieve with minimal sappiness." - Library Journal
"Ciment writes with her usual stylistic grace, but the novel doesn't quite achieve a balance among its vaguely apocalyptic bent, its satirical moments, and the tepid sentimentalism at its core." - Publishers Weekly
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Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Jill Ciment was born in Montreal, Canada. She is the author of four novels, The Tattoo Artist, Teeth of the Dog, The Law of Falling Bodies and Heroic Measures; a collection of short stories, Small Claims; and a memoir, Half a Life. Ciment is a professor of English at the University of Florida. She lives in Gainesville, Florida.
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