So Long, Princess [SIGNED COPY, FIRST PRINTING]

Lisa Perlman, coping with a writing career, glitzy New York media circles, two grown daughters, lovers who come and go, her mother, and a brother just out of the closet, finds peace after meeting Eric, a neurotic Nobel physicist

Lisa Perlman, a 40-ish divorcee with two daughters, begins her first-person narrative in a fitting spother psychiatrist's office. An unpublished novelist and unemployed art dealer, Lisa clearly has problems. Men come into her life, cause turmoil, then leave. Her daughters continually remind Lisa to act her age, while her mother frets that Lisa hasn't remarried. With broad comic strokes, Brooker, herself an artist, paints a funny and poignant picture of two years in her hyper, pill-popping heroine's life. The story focuses on Lisa's efforts to write the action novel that her potential publisher wants and her on-and-off affair with a neurotic professor. Occasionally, Lisa's endless complaints, invariably played for laughs, come close to being as burdensome for the reader as they are for Lisa. A little cat-box and gynecological humor goes a long way. Despite this, Brooker's first novel succeeds as fast-paced, insightful entertainment.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

If you have patrons who go for perky heroines of the ex-Jewish Princess variety with a penchant for lots of introspective ruminating, then they may like this novel within a novel about an ex-Jewish Princess trying to get her first novel published. San Francisco-based Brooker has created heroine Lisa Perlman, a single mother whose children mother her, who sees a therapist for her anxiety attacks, and who finds at 43 true love and a new baby with equally neurotic Eric. Along the way Lisa's brother comes out of the closet, so gay issues are explored. However, the main focus is Lisa's desire to write a serious novel versus her editor's desire for a glitzy story. In the end, Lisa gives birth to two babies, one a literary one, one a real one. There is lots of San Francisco chic and ambience. Too cutesy for some, this will still have some appeal. Rosellen Brewer, Monterey Cty. Lib. , Seaside, Cal.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.