Much Ado About Jessie Kaplan

I was sufficiently entertained by Jane Austen in Scarsdale to want to pick up Paula Marantz Cohen's other books. After reading this book (the first of two to be filled by my library) I may just cancel my hold on Jane Austen in Boca.

I suppose this, like JA in Scarsdale, is a comic novel of manners. But something didn't quite click for me. The separate elements of the story line--the septuagenarian mother's sudden flashbacks into a previous life as Shakespeare's paramour, the teenage daughter's bat mitzvah, the sexy sister's unlikely romance with the middle school teacher--seemed interesting enough, but they never quite gelled together for me to make one nice, interesting, cohesive read.

The best part of the story for me was the old lady's "past life" awakening. Jessie Kaplan remembers details of her life as the Dark Lady who inspired William Shakespeare's later sonnets and his Merchant of Venice. Her complete absorption in this realization worries her daughters but intrigues her granddaugher's English teacher, who believes her so much he takes her on a trip to Venice to see if they can find the sonnets she had hidden away in her old life. But even this storyline didn't end on a satisfactory enough note for me.

I truly hated the "BatMitzvah-zilla" aspect of the story. While I'm sure Bat Mitzvahs have become another competitive sport among well-to-do parents, I wasn't entertained by the accounts of Carla and Mark fighting with stationers, caterers, entertainers, florists, and their daughter over this event. Maybe you'd have to have experienced the craziness of a Bat Mitzvah to appreciate them. Or maybe over-the-top parenting has just become such a cliche that it no longer inspires laughter?