Fear and Yoga in New Jersey
A Novel
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Nina Gettleman-Summer, a New Jersey yoga teacher, should be calmly guiding her high powered students through their savasanas and their chakras. Instead she is worried about...everything: her new meditation fountain overflowed causing one of her more litigious students to slip and fall; her husband Michael's job was outsourced to the Phillipines; and a hurricane is bearing down on her parents home in Florida. The last thing Nina needs is her suspicious mother around, wailing about the weather and asking questions about Michael's job. To complicate matters, her teenage son Adam is showing an interest in having a Bar Mitzvah—even though Nina, never a fan of her Jewish heritage, signed the family up at the local Unitarian Church. The Gettleman-Summers are poised for an awakening which, when it arrives, is deftly portrayed in Galant's classic screwball style.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Galant follows up her colorful debut, Rattled, with another funny suburban family satire. Nina Gettleman's new yoga studio on the swank side of an old, unnamed Essex County town floods when her poorly placed waiting-room chakra-meditation fountain leaks. One of Nina's students threatens to sue, and she's unable to get solace from her husband, Michael, who has been laid off from his job as a meteorologist at Newark Airport. Meanwhile, puberty-age son Adam has decided he's tired of being a lapsed Jew and wants to have a platinum bar mitzvah. The straw that breaks the familial camel's back is the arrival of Nina's hypercritical mother and elderly father, who take refuge in the family's home to escape a Florida hurricane. And then Michael gets into some serious trouble with the law. Galant has a lock on upper-middle class suburban skewerings and makes ribald fun of overbearing Jewish mothers and terrorism crackdowns gone awry. But loose ends, an overextended midsection, a rushed ending and a protagonist who never really evolves make this sophomore effort fall short of enlightenment.
