From Publishers Weekly
Leff serves up a slice of the good life in this group portrait novel, following the lives of the residents of an exclusive prewar co-op building in New York City from the 1970s to the present day. The denizens of 980 Park Avenue have little in common except for their tony address on Manhattan's Upper East Side. Genial attorney Dick Sapphire, the building's first Jewish resident, struggles through the suicide of his first wife and the career ambitions of a second. Mrs. Coddington, an archetypal WASP, presides over the building's co-op board and spends her boorish husband's ample wealth. Angela Somoza, granddaughter of a Latin dictator, defies her heritage by smuggling in illegal Guatemalan freedom fighters and denouncing the anti-Semitism of the co-op board. Battles of race, religion and ideology give an edge to this cozy chronicle. Leff provides plenty of glittering details, but she doesn't neglect the lives of the building's service people, like elevator operator Vinnie, who becomes a fashion designer. Her protagonists are types, but Leff is skilled at teasing out their small idiosyncrasies. Sedate and slightly old-fashioned, this is a warmhearted, generously imagined New York story.
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From AudioFile
The lives being lived cheek by jowl in a luxury Park Avenue apartment building make for a delicious comedy of manners in these artful linked stories. Carrington MacDuffie does an enchanting Angelina Samoza, the Nicaraguan socialite with only slightly crossed eyes who has a slew of Guatamalan illegals living in her maid's room. MacDuffie's perfect Italian accent, quite distinct from her perfect Spanish one, comes into play when Vinnie, the fired doorman, makes a fortune importing couture knockoffs from the Old Country. And Dick Sapphire's long dead Jewish mother chimes in, as wonderfully inflected as a voice from a Woody Allen movie. Leff's vertical slice of New York life is a stylish entertainment on the page and is even more amusing in this wonderful production. B.G. © AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine--
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