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by Emily Culliton
A wildly entertaining debut about a Brooklyn Heights wife and mother who has embezzled a small fortune from her children's private school and makes a run for it, leaving behind her trust fund poet husband, his maybe-secret lover, her two daughters, and a school board who will do anything to find her.
Marion Palm prefers not to think of herself as a thief but rather "a woman who embezzles." Over the years she has managed to steal $180,000 from her daughters' private school, money that has paid for European vacations, a Sub-Zero refrigerator, and perpetually unused state-of-the-art exercise equipment. But, now, when the school faces an audit, Marion pulls piles of rubber-banded cash from their basement hiding places and flees, leaving her family to grapple with the baffled detectives, the irate school board, and the mother-shaped hole in their house.
Told from the points of view of Nathan, Marion's husband, heir to a long-diminished family fortune; Ginny, Marion's teenage daughter who falls helplessly in love at the slightest provocation; Jane, Marion's youngest who is obsessed with a missing person of her own; and Marion herself, on the lam - and hiding in plain sight.
"Starred Review. [A] wonderful and sharp debut novel...Culliton's prose is effortless and wickedly clever; its ability to condone and condemn in the most succinct way is a testament to the author's storytelling and characterization skills...This debut novel signals the arrival of an exciting talent." - Publishers Weekly
"Starred Review. Culliton tempers her generally unlikable characters with short chapters, often under three pages; omniscient third-person narration; and oddly comic - think Miranda July - writing. Readers who have wished the narration of The Royal Tenenbaums was an actual book need look no further than The Misfortune of Marion Palm." - Booklist
"Starred Review. With her mordant wit, deft plotting, and clever storytelling, Culliton is a young novelist to watch." - Library Journal
"Emily Culliton is the no-nonsense, take-no-prisoners storyteller we've been waiting for and with Marion Palm she's created an ingenious anti-heroine. Sly, lean, subversively comic, The Misfortune of Marion Palm is a dangerously addictive confection for readers hungry for the intelligent humor of Lydia Davis and the dark elegance of Muriel Spark." - Mona Awad, author of 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl
"There are only two questions regarding The Misfortune of Marion Palm: Do you read it quickly or do you read it slowly? You'll want to race through it and yet there is brilliance to savor in every single sentence." - Katherine Heiny, author of Single, Carefree, Mellow;
"Emily's Culliton's Brooklyn family drama-cum-mystery offers up a female heroine for whom money speaks louder than motherhood. If it's shocking, it's also refreshing." - Lucinda Rosenfeld, author of Class
"Combine one crumbling brownstone, two children in private school, a clueless husband with a dwindling trust fund, millions of dollars squandered, and what do you get? A mom on the run and one of the funniest debut novels I've had the good fortune to read." - Kevin Kwan, author of Crazy Rich Asians and Rich People Problems
This information about The Misfortune of Marion Palm was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Emily Culliton is a PhD candidate at the University of Denver for fiction and earned her MFA from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She was born and raised in Brooklyn.
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