Monday, July 17, 2023

Ms Demeanor

Elinor Lipman is on my list of favorite authors.   I have read all her books.  She has a funny, sarcastic, and realistic writing style.  You can laugh out loud at the antics she puts her characters through. They are the over top exaggeration of things many of us think about but never do or at least not to the level here characters go to.

This time we meet Jane, a up and coming lawyer, who meets with a fellow law clerk on the roof of her apartment building in New York City one evening for drinks.  When they are discovered on the roof in stages of undress, Jane is given a leave of absence from the law firm and sentenced to house arrest.

What looks like the end of her career and a very unpleasant six months ahead of her, becomes much more interesting when she meets a fellow convict in the building.  The antics only grow from there. 

Creating extreme escapades and taking silly behavior to the upmost limit, Lipman builds a very entertaining life for two people who cannot leave the building. Finding ways to entertain themselves within their two apartments and build their relationship is the center of the novel.  Adding in a twin sister who is there for support and the tattletale neighbor who, Jane has not heard the last of after she accuses her of indecent exposure, becomes the comedic plot that this novel revolves around.

Elinor Lipman has done it again.  A novel you become absorbed in and do want to put down until the end.

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