From Publishers Weekly
In this strong debut novel, Schwartz takes a hard look at the dark secrets hiding within a marriage. Depressed over the death of her mother six months before, Jane Rosen, a stay-at-home mom of three girls and longtime wife to busy, self-absorbed rabbi Saul, finally flies down to her mother's long-empty Florida house to put her affairs in order. There, Jane finds evidence of a mother she never knew, while Saul contends with the girls—in particular unhappy, fragile 16-year-old Malkah—and a dying congregant's bombshell confession, that he had an affair with Jane 10 years before. Shocked and wounded, Saul tells Jane not to come home, leaving her to pursue her mother's secret life. Soon, Jane's caught up with a gardener who traps her in a spider web of drugs, sex and secrets. At home, Malkah's descent into depression and Saul's compounding fury push the family toward tragedy. Though readers may feel the couple is let too easily off the hook, Schwartz pursues both threads of the story unflinchingly to the end.
(Mar.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
About the Author
Sheila Schwartz's work has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Ploughshares, and Triquarterly, as well as in anthologies such as The O. Henry Prize Stories and The Pushcart Prize. She was awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1993 and an Ohio Arts Council Grant in 2005.
