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Swell: A Novel
(OverDrive MP3 Audiobook, OverDrive Listen)

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Average Rating
Published:
Hachette Audio 2017
Status:
Available from OverDrive
Description
Thirty years after From Rockaway ("A great first novel", Harper's Bazaar), Jill Eisenstadt returns with a darkly funny new work of fiction that exposes a city and a family at their most vulnerable.
When Sue Glassman's family needs a new home, Sue relents, after years of resisting, and agrees to convert to Judaism. In return, Sue's father-in-law, Sy, buys the family — Sue, Dan, and their two daughters — a capacious but ramshackle beachfront house in Rockaway, Queens, a world away from the Glassmans' cramped Tribeca apartment. The catch? Sy is moving in, too. And the house is haunted.
On the weekend of Sue's conversion party, ninety-year-old Rose, who (literally) got away with murder on the premises years earlier, shows up uninvited. Towing a suitcase-sized pocketbook, having escaped an assisted living facility in Forest Hills, Rose seems intent on moving back in. Enter neighbor Tim — formerly Timmy (see From Rockaway), a former lifeguard, former firefighter, and reformed alcoholic — who feels, for reasons even he can't explain, inordinately protective of the Glassmans.
The collective nervous breakdown occasioned by Rose's return swells to operatic heights in a novel that charms and surprises on every page as it unflinchingly addresses the perils of living in a world rife with uncertainty.
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Format:
OverDrive MP3 Audiobook, OverDrive Listen
Edition:
Unabridged
Street Date:
06/06/2017
Language:
English
ISBN:
9781478912712
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Citations
APA Citation (style guide)

Courtney Patterson. (2017). Swell: A Novel. Unabridged Hachette Audio.

Chicago / Turabian - Author Date Citation (style guide)

Courtney Patterson. 2017. Swell: A Novel. Hachette Audio.

Chicago / Turabian - Humanities Citation (style guide)

Courtney Patterson, Swell: A Novel. Hachette Audio, 2017.

MLA Citation (style guide)

Courtney Patterson. Swell: A Novel. Unabridged Hachette Audio, 2017.

Note! Citation formats are based on standards as of July 2022. Citations contain only title, author, edition, publisher, and year published. Citations should be used as a guideline and should be double checked for accuracy.
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Grouped Work ID:
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Needs Update?:
No
Date Added:
Jun 12, 2018 20:00:03
Date Updated:
Oct 31, 2022 20:29:33
Last Metadata Check:
Mar 24, 2024 11:39:28
Last Metadata Change:
Feb 17, 2024 11:34:40
Last Availability Check:
Mar 24, 2024 11:39:31
Last Availability Change:
Mar 09, 2023 13:41:09
Last Grouped Work Modification Time:
Mar 29, 2024 02:17:20

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title
Swell
fullDescription
Thirty years after From Rockaway ("A great first novel", Harper's Bazaar), Jill Eisenstadt returns with a darkly funny new work of fiction that exposes a city and a family at their most vulnerable.
When Sue Glassman's family needs a new home, Sue relents, after years of resisting, and agrees to convert to Judaism. In return, Sue's father-in-law, Sy, buys the family — Sue, Dan, and their two daughters — a capacious but ramshackle beachfront house in Rockaway, Queens, a world away from the Glassmans' cramped Tribeca apartment. The catch? Sy is moving in, too. And the house is haunted.
On the weekend of Sue's conversion party, ninety-year-old Rose, who (literally) got away with murder on the premises years earlier, shows up uninvited. Towing a suitcase-sized pocketbook, having escaped an assisted living facility in Forest Hills, Rose seems intent on moving back in. Enter neighbor Tim — formerly Timmy (see From Rockaway), a former lifeguard, former firefighter, and reformed alcoholic — who feels, for reasons even he can't explain, inordinately protective of the Glassmans.
The collective nervous breakdown occasioned by Rose's return swells to operatic heights in a novel that charms and surprises on every page as it unflinchingly addresses the perils of living in a world rife with uncertainty.
reviews
      • premium: True
      • source: Publisher's Weekly
      • content:

        April 17, 2017
        Eisenstadt’s (From Rockaway) detailed and eclectic novel takes readers to a dilapidated oceanfront house full of secrets, ghosts, and an old woman’s cast-off tchotchkes. In the wake of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the Glassmans move from their small, suddenly uninhabitable Tribeca apartment with their two daughters (and one on the way) to a Rockaway beach house, bought for them by Sue Glassman’s father-in-law, Sy. To Sue’s chagrin, this is on the condition that Sy move in with them—and that Sue convert to Judaism. Moreover, the house is falling apart and full of the prior owner’s possessions. Rose, an elderly Italian lady, shows up at their doorstep in a wheelchair demanding her house back and her garden restored. She spends multiple afternoons sitting in the Glassmans’ garden, accusing them of conspiring to swindle her. Heavily pregnant, Sue wants nothing more than to be rid of the pesky former owner and her old junk. But the more Sue learns about Rose and the house, the more she comes to see how intertwined the two really are. In this touching portrait of ordinary people grappling with the aftershocks of 9/11—memorials, uncertainty, death, and a new life—the emotional upheaval of a national tragedy leaves no one unaffected.

      • premium: True
      • source: Kirkus
      • content:

        April 1, 2017
        In the immediate wake of 9/11, a young family uproots their lives in Manhattan to resettle in a ramshackle Rockaway beach house--and, over the course of one momentous weekend, finds a whole lot more drama than they bargained for.Desperate for a new place to live and short on cash, Dan and Sue Glassman are vulnerable when Dan's curmudgeonly father, Sy, makes them an offer too convenient to refuse: if Sue, now pregnant with the couple's third child, will finally convert to Judaism, Sy will buy the family a beach house in Rockaway, with the controversial caveat that he'll also live there. And this time, though she has resisted conversion for years, Sue acquiesces: "Blame hormones or love or the post-terror downtown stench, but moving suddenly seemed like the only option." But the house comes with baggage of its own, and when the previous owner, Rose--a plucky 90-year-old who, less than a decade earlier, got away with (literal) murder in the dining room--wheels up to the front door the weekend of Sue's conversion party and refuses to leave, the family's best-laid plans are thrown into chaos. If Rose is telling the truth, the house has been sold without her consent; if she isn't, the fact remains that they still have to figure out what to do with the geriatric force of nature squatting on the premises. But while they don't know it, the Glassmans have something of an unlikely guardian in their next-door neighbor Tim Ray, a divorced ex-firefighter with half a nose who's haunted by the mistakes of his booze-soaked past and feels an inexplicable attachment to the family. With tremendous tenderness, Eisenstadt (Kiss Out, 1991, etc.) captures the traumatized Rockaway of the early 2000s in swirling Technicolor, though her zany and colorful characters never quite manage to transcend their laundry lists of quirks to become fully human. But what the novel lacks in nuance, it makes up in heart. A whimsical portrait of a still-raw community that mostly hits the mark.

        COPYRIGHT(2017) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

      • premium: True
      • source: Booklist
      • content:

        May 15, 2017
        In Eisenstadt's follow-up to her much earlier From Rockaway (1987), we're back at the beach with some of the same characters. The previous book was a coming-of-age story about the lives of young people in Rockaway looking for direction. This time those characters are older, dealing with very different kinds of issues, some personal, others driven by current events; the book opens with a boatload of illegal Chinese aliens landing on Rockaway Beach in 1993 and moves on to the effects of 9/11 and Hurricane Sandy. Matriarch Rose Impolitari is at the center of the novel; after a brief hiatus at an assisted-care facility elsewhere in Queens, she returns to Rockaway, and her presence impacts the rest of the cast, including pregnant Sue Glassman, whose decision to convert to Judaism leads to a conversion party that is one of the book's fine set pieces. With a pitch-perfect narrative voice and plenty of humor, Eisenstadt captures the lives of her Mets-loving and Yankee-hating characters in vivid detail.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)

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shortDescription
Thirty years after From Rockaway ("A great first novel", Harper's Bazaar), Jill Eisenstadt returns with a darkly funny new work of fiction that exposes a city and a family at their most vulnerable.
When Sue Glassman's family needs a new home, Sue relents, after years of resisting, and agrees to convert to Judaism. In return, Sue's father-in-law, Sy, buys the family — Sue, Dan, and their two daughters — a capacious but ramshackle beachfront house in Rockaway, Queens, a world away from the Glassmans' cramped Tribeca apartment. The catch? Sy is moving in, too. And the house is haunted.
On the weekend of Sue's conversion party, ninety-year-old Rose, who (literally) got away with murder on the premises years earlier, shows up uninvited. Towing a suitcase-sized pocketbook, having escaped an assisted living facility in Forest Hills, Rose seems intent on moving back in. Enter neighbor Tim — formerly Timmy (see From Rockaway), a former...
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