Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #21183 in Books
• Published on: 2008-02-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 304 pages

Review
'Wonderfully, painfully funny.' --Psychologies Magazine

'Relentlessly good; crammed with brilliant, skewering details, for which Mendelson has a magpie's eye.' --The Observer - Pick of the Paperbacks 2008

Daily Mail
'This is the wickedly funny and poignant story of a Jewish family in crisis, beautifully observed and painfully authentic.'

Sunday Telegraph
`Charlotte Mendelson's portrait of a Jewish family in crisis is both extremely funny and acutely painful...'

Customer Reviews

A Wonderful Family Dysfunction Novel
I'm a big fan of Mendelson's work in general, and this novel did not disappoint. Although as a youngest sibling I might quibble with her tendency to sympathize with eldest siblings, her depiction of familial relationships and conflicts is unparalleled.

As someone with a female rabbi in her family, I appreciated her humanization of Claudia Rubin, the matriarch and rabbi around whom the other characters (and the action of the novel) revolves. I was particularly fascinated by the idea of someone who can connect with and lead strangers, but fails to connect with and lead her own family. While other reviewers here might feel that rabbis must demonstrate spiritual leadership, in the familial realm that's often not the case. Rabbis can be people with problems too.

Most importantly, Mendelson's writing is positively propulsive. It's rare to find a literary writer, with such creative and original language and imagery, who can also drive a page-turning plot. I had to force myself to slow down to appreciate the writing, because I kept speeding up to find out what was going to happen!

Disorder Galore!
Mendelson takes us to a very special wedding on the first page of this witty and socially incendiary novel. The Rubin family have turned out to see one of their members, their first son Leo, married before his Rabbi mother Claudia, easily the most exotic, creature in the world: `No one is interested in you. There is one star of this show: tall and distractingly voluptuous in sea-green silk devore. With her in their mist...who could not be happy?' Yet Leo strangely has other plans. He elopes before the congregation with the seductive wife of the presiding Rabbi and precipates the whole Rubin family into chaotic disarray. Claudia's control begins to slip. Her dutiful daughter Frances, once gratefully married to the monstrously complacent Jonathan, falls for the `boyfriend' of her younger sister and finds that attraction has its own surprises and rewards. Rebellion mounts and even Claudia's steady husband Norman has his own preoccupations and secrets. Mendelson's writing delights in its frothy intelligence, sudden illumination and underlining compassion for the disordering impulses that may unravel our tried and tested lives, yet also redeem us, as we discover who we really, honestly are.

Reuben Sachs for the noughties
When we were bad is a wickedly incisive dissection of a Jewish family, dominated by a fabulous matriarch.

This description of North London Jewish family over the course of a 4 months in their lives is clever, funny and insightful. Although some of the characters are better drawn than the others, overall the picture of an enmeshed family, all in the shadow of their gloriously domineering mother, comes through as totally believable and captivating.

A rollicking good read.