NEW RELEASE


Suzanne Davis Gets a Life - Paula Marantz Cohen(2014)

Suzanne Davis lives in a shoebox of an apartment in New York, writing press releases for an air-conditioning company, avoiding her vastly annoying mother and has the ever-increasing sound of her biological clock ticking. With her 35th birthday approaching, she decides to take matters into her own hands and employ the Jane Austen technique of keeping things small. But rather than focusing on three or four families in a village, she decides to search for her soul mate in her own apartment building. Her search takes us through a number of different social groups, namely the mothers in the local playground, a book club, dog walking group, her work and the ageing Jewish residents in her block. Whilst focusing all of her efforts on getting a life, Suzanne discovers that she has a serious illness, which causes her to re-evaluate her life and what she wants from it. Suzanne's character narrates the story and it is at times witty and always self-deprecating. You get drawn into her desire to meet the right partner and to settle down. I found the constant references to the size of her apartment and that she pays $200 an hour to see her therapist a bit wearing after a while. There were some witty and amusing parts; my favourite was her quest to help the elderly Jewish residents. However, I found that the author launched into descriptive paragraphs and detail which I started to skim over. The reference to her annoying toxic mother for the early stages of the book were not really substantiated in my view, however when Suzanne falls ill, her view of her mother is altered. Overall, there were witty one-liners, but nothing that made me laugh out loud and I never really felt that I truly connected with the character so couldn't sympathise with her as much when she became ill. This was a relatively short novel, less than 200 pages, and I did find myself at times skimming through the descriptive passages. Worth a look but not my cup of tea. (EH)



It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single woman in possession of a New York City apartment must be in want of a husband. That's the Austen-inspired premise behind Suzanne Davis Gets a Life, by Paula Marantz Cohen. The summary says: "SWF, witty, attractive, 31 YO (actually 34), seeks a real life in NYC. Men encouraged to apply. Expect roadblocks. Suzanne lounges around her tiny New York City apartment in her pajamas, writing press releases for the International Association of Air-Conditioning Engineers, listening to the ticking of her biological clock, and feeling sorry for herself. As her 35th birthday looms, Suzanne embarks on a characteristically wrong-headed, but very funny, quest - to find Mr Right and start the family she hopes will give meaning to her life. Suzanne's quest plunges us into the world of her Upper West Side apartment building - a world of overly invested mothers, fanatical dog-owners, curmudgeonly aged Jews, and young (and not so young) professionals. All are keenly observed by Suzanne, our feckless narrator, whose witty self-deprecation endears her to us even as it makes us want to shake some sense into her. Is she on the right track? Can her search possibly yield the meaning she craves? When she is diagnosed with cancer and her extremely annoying mother arrives to take care of her, it appears that her plan has been hijacked. But has it? The ordeal of treatment opens her to new people and a new perspective. She ends by getting a life, even as she may lose one." Suzanne Davis Gets a Life is out in May 2014.

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