Rattled (Hardcover)

by Debra Galant (Author) "All Heather wanted was a nice house..." (more)
Key Phrases: Galapagos Estates, Heather Peters, Harlan White (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Galant skewers the shallow, striving, McMansion-dwelling suburbanites in this engaging satire. Heather Peters is staring 35 in the face—though "depending on the light, [she could] still pass for a high school cheerleader"; her husband, Kevin, can barely stand her half the time, and her son, Conner, is a complete misfit—but at least they've just landed their dream home in Galapagos Estates, a new development in New Jersey. Galant follows their comic trials and those of two longtime area residents: Agnes, an animal lover and PETA sympathizer, and egg farmer Harlan White, who freelances as a handyman and makes a "fortune off those suckers." Which is how Harlan finds himself smashing the head of an endangered rattlesnake on Heather's back porch... and how Heather gets arrested after Agnes fingers her as the murderer of an endangered species... and how Galapagos Estates becomes the center of a media firestorm. Heather's rise to fame as a "rattlesnake killer" makes a handy metaphor about urban sprawl and the battle of new residents versus old ones, and pokes fun at the oversize egos of slimy developers and yuppies alike. Galant shows a keen knowledge of the real estate turf war and its soldiers in this wincingly funny book—but craft sympathetic characters she does not. (Feb.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
When Heather Peters, lawyer's wife and mother of a twisted third-grader, snaps up her dream McMansion in rural New Jersey, she doesn't know it's sitting, literally, on a rattlesnake den. But soon a rattler rears its ugly head, Heather's taciturn handyman steps in with a croquet mallet, and the local enviros descend, accusing Heather of killing an endangered species. Next, the press latches on, and, before you know it, the crooked money-grubbing developer behind Heather's nouveau riche castle is sucked into Debra Galant's rollicking suburban morality tale, Rattled.

These deftly drawn characters elicit both winces and laughs. Describing Heather's particular form of disciplined narcissism, Galant writes, "She checked the mirror often, but it wasn't out of vanity. It was more like a breast self-exam." When Heather was in labor with her son, Connor, "she'd reapplied her lipstick between contractions."

Endangered-species crusader Agnes, by contrast, revels in her unreconstructed hippie trappings. "Agnes was listening to All Things Considered on the radio and sorting through the dozens of science experiments in her refrigerator," writes Galant. "But all she could find were jars of mango chutney crusted with mysterious white crystals, putrid containers of month-old soup, olives that looked biblical in provenance."

Formerly a suburban-life columnist for the New York Times, Galant has wisely chosen familiar terrain for her first novel, displaying a mastery for details. Touring the home he's about to purchase in the Galapagos Estates development, Heather's husband notes, "The smaller of the two walk-in closets in the master bedroom was bigger than the room he'd slept in as a boy." Like so many newly well-off professionals, Tom is both thrilled and quietly appalled by his bloated salary and his wife's obsession with acquiring an outsized home.

The Peters' subdivision may be new, but the local grade school exerts the same pressures on its young charges as did schools of yore. When a couple of cool kids approach Connor's misfit table in the cafeteria, "he suddenly felt a change in the molecular structure of the air, indicating that a popular kid was in the vicinity."

Like Tom Perrotta in his marvelous novel of repressed suburban child-rearing, Little Children, Galant captures the particular tyrannies of modern parenting. At the Pine Hills Halloween feast, for instance, "the class moms were expected to lay out a Halloween repast reasonably low in sugar and chocolate, and of course nut-free, while maintaining -- as Principal Gupnick was fond of saying -- the 'festive feel' of the holiday."

Galant skewers everything that's awful about exurbia: striving yuppies blinded by acquisitive mania, greedy developers who bulldoze pristine terrain, strident enviros toiling to protect venomous snakes at all costs. A gumshoe journalist is the only player who doesn't come out smelling rotten. By the time her satisfyingly serpentine story ends, Galant figures out how to give all her characters a measure of what they deserve.

Reviewed by Susan Adams
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press (February 21, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312349319
• ISBN-13: 978-0312349318
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.5 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars See all reviews (25 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #746,567 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars In the Big House Now, May 16, 2006

By	Pseudonymous the Younger - See all my reviews

When we first bought our modest little townhouse, there was an enchanted wood behind us. And in that wood were chipmunks and raccoons, white-tailed deer and woodchucks and the songs of bluebirds. Then a great evil came out of the North. Dozens of giant 4500 square-foot McMansions began popping up in the wood like malignant mushrooms. The songs of the bluebirds are gone, and so are the cute animals. My wife and I often wonder what manner of evil creatures dwell in those houses. (We like to imagine that they are pale and only come out at night to feed.)

Rattled is the hilarious story of a woman who moves into a McMansion home development like the one in my backyard. She is a self-centered, materialistic, upwardly mobile, overly-assertive, hyper-energenic yuppie housewife who ends up battling just about everyone and everything in the community (including neighbors, rattlesnakes, rattlesnake lovers, corrupt developers, other 3rd grade class moms, and a lot of rats) in order to achieve the life she feels entitled to.(Imagine the Eva Longoria character from Desperate Housewives on steroids.) And while Rattled may sound like a "woman's book", it is not. Everyone (adults only, please) will enjoy it. It is the kind of book Carl Hiaasen would have written if Carl Hiaasen were a woman and lived in New Jersey and . . . you know. . . had hundreds of rats in his basement.

Also, I have to admit, reading this book made me feel much better about my new neighbors: maybe they'll be invaded by rats and rattlesnakes too.

Highly recommended.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Fun but Dumb, June 30, 2006

By	L. M. Masson "Queen Lisa" (Mars) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

A good summer read, but ridiculous. This is good chewing gum for the brain. Perhaps an easy read on the beach, or on a plane. Perhaps you want to read the comics, but already have.
Rattled won't go into the history books as good literature.

6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Snakes are the Good Guys, February 24, 2006

By	Susan Cramer "Harsh Critic" (G'ville, Ohio) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

"Rattled" by Debra Galant has all the characters we love to hate-the slimy developer, the shallow and acquisitive yuppie couple, the Stepfordesque PTO moms. The comedic drama is played out on the vanishing home turf of the endangered New Jersey timber Rattler. Deadly yet endearing, these snakes may well be the most sympathetic characters in the book! In her well-plotted first novel, former NY Times columnist Debra Galant serves up a simmering stew of social issue and slaptick. "Rattled" is Anna Quindlen meets the Marx Brothers