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Summary
Summary
A hilarious and deliciously scathing send-up of motherhood as practiced in the upper echelons of Manhattan society, from the coauthor ofThe Right AddressandWolves in Chic Clothing. The mothers on Manhattan's chic Upper East Side are highly educated, extremely wealthy, and very competitive. They throw themselves and all of their energy and resources into full-time child rearing, turning their kids into the unwitting pawns in a game where success is measured in precocious achievements, jam-packed schedules, and elite private-school pedigrees. Hannah Allen has recently moved to the neighborhood with her New York City--bred investment banker husband and their two-year-old daughter, Violet. She's immediately inundated by an outpouring of advice from her not-so-well-intentioned new friends and her overbearing, socially conscious mother-in-law, who coach her on matters ranging from where to buy the must-have $300 baby dress to how to get into the only pre-pre-preschool that counts. Despite her better instincts and common sense, Hannah soon finds herself caught up in the competitive whirl of high-stakes mothering.
Author Notes
Jill Kargman is an author, writer, and actor based in New York City's Upper East Side. She was born in 1974 in New York City. Kargman appears as a satirical version of herself in a Bravo scripted comedy television show called Odd Mom Out. The show is written by her and based on her novel Momzillas. Her book, Sometimes I Feel Like a Nut: Essays and Observations was published in 2011. In 2015 it became listed as a New York Times bestseller.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Kargman is no worse off without writing partner Carrie Karasyov (The Right Address; Wolves in Chic Clothing) in her first solo novel, a breezy jaunt through the Manhattan nursery grinder. Recently relocated to the Upper East Side from San Francisco after her husband, Josh, took a lucrative job, Hannah Allen is thrown into the mommy snake pit by her domineering mother-in-law, Lila Allen Dillingham, who introduces Hannah to a cabal of neighborhood moms led by the "drop dead gorgissima" Bee Elliott. Hannah, a black-jeans-and-Converse art history grad and mother of too-cute two-year-old Violet, struggles to please Lila and keep up with Bee's hypercompetitive crew of "Kelly-bag-toting, Chanel-suit-wearing, Bugaboo-pushing sharks" who fret over their children's head circumferences and admissions into pre-preschools with three-year waiting lists. There's no shortage of name-dropping and light humor as Hannah struggles to win a co-op board's approval, keep her marriage afloat and get Violet into Carnegie Nursery School. Though a bevy of "awky" abbreviations litter the narrative ("unfortch" "sitch," "actsch"), Kargman writes with verve. Fans of the genre won't be disappointed. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
When Hannah Allen's husband's job brings them from San Francisco to Manhattan, she's ill prepared for life as a Park Avenue mother. In this land of elite pre-preschools, pacifier consultants, and children's birthday parties held in hotel ballrooms, gossip and competitive bragging are the pastimes of choice. Hannah finds herself struggling to feel at home and make new friends, and jabs from her snobby mother-in-law aren't helping matters. Kargman offers a voyeuristic view of the good life and its bad side in a novel that is entertaining but also insubstantial, peppered with pop-culture references and enough lingo and cute abbreviations to necessitate a glossary. However, Momzillas does mark the rise of a new trend in contemporary fiction: mom lit. Building on the success of tot-filled tomes like The Nanny Diaries (2002) and Little Earthquakes (2004), the fiction of singledom is giving way to the fiction of motherhood, and readers are snapping these books up. --Aleksandra Kostovski Copyright 2007 Booklist
Kirkus Review
West Coast transplant does battle with Manhattan's über-moms--Kargman's first solo after co-authoring two books with Carrie Karasyov (Wolves in Chic Clothing, 2005, etc.). When Hannah Foster's husband, Josh, announces he's been offered a dream job in New York City, Hannah supports him completely--even if it means uprooting her two-year-old daughter, Violet, and leaving behind her close-knit group of San Francisco friends. Hannah dutifully packs up their home and heads cross-country. Despite the sterile temporary apartment, Hannah's determined to make the move work for her family and give Violet an amazing New York experience. Josh, a native New Yorker, won't have time to help Hannah transition into this strange world. The best he can do is to connect Hannah with a high-school chum, Bee--now the queen of the "momzillas," or New York's elite mothers. These size-two gals inhabit Manhattan's Upper East Side and make it their mission to look flawless while rearing the next generation of Ivy Leaguers. Perfectly groomed and hyper-connected within New York society, Bee and her cohorts can make or break Hannah's acceptance into this world of $18,000 private preschools. Hannah's Nine Inch Nails concert tees and Converse sneakers don't mesh with cashmere twin sets and pearls, but since Hannah wants the very best for Violet, she's willing to play their game. Making her way in this alien world where moms outsource the dirty work isn't a snap, and the outwardly helpful Bee has it in for Hannah. Navigating the playground politics of this privileged crowd nearly breaks Hannah's spirit. Fortunately, she's able to shake off her na™vet and claim the city in her own way. The author has strong ideas but relies too heavily on acronyms and abbreviations and fails to create a multidimensional villain. Still, a decent effort that debunks the myth of the perfect mommy. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Excerpts
Excerpts
One I am staring at the crystalline frozen tundra of ice-licked Alaska. Surrounded by an endless snowy desert, a little Eskimo girl pounds her way through the rushing, snowflake-laden wind as cheerful music plays. " Put on your kami-kluk to stay warm and dry ..." No, I didn't board a flight to Juneau. I'm watching Sesame Street with my daughter, Violet. It's one of Grover's world-friendly segments where global cultures are profiled through the dewy, pure lens of a child's eyes. We visit a Chinese boy who is a top acrobat and can spin fourteen plates on his face and a little Indonesian girl who can balance six bowls on the top of her head. While dancing. Today Grover has transported us to the forty-ninth state--and our local lass is suiting up to face the Arctic chill, with the help of her mother, who sews fur pelts together to fashion a tikiyook , or coat, to repel the subzero temps. She rushes out into the crisp fresh air to meet other children, also clad in PETA's worst nightmare, and skips off into the fluffy white mounds, laughing sweetly. It all looks so wholesome, so simple, so uncomplicated. No fancy schools to get into, no apartments to compare. It looked pleasant there, out in the bleak but weirdly alluring slate of glistening frost punctuated only by playful tykes toting their homemade lunches to school in swinging buckets. But then the bilious pit in my stomach reasserted itself, and I couldn't help but think this awful, impure thought: I bet one of the moms is looking over the other kids' kami-kluks to see if the stitching is better. Or if the book sack one mom made is as creatively patterned as another. I am certain one family's igloo is grander, another's dogsled more impressive. I was watching this on my television, in my apartment, not set in a downy white backdrop, but rather in the lion's den of competitive mommies: New York City's Upper East Side. In California, where my husband, Josh, and I lived before the relocation plunge a month ago, the one orange Bugaboo stroller on our block was so strange and uncommon a sight, people thought aliens had delivered it via flying saucer. In New York, the Rolls Royce of strollers is as common as yellow cabs--and the streets are just as jammed with them, but instead of reeking of an overpowering air-freshener-and-curry combo, they smelled of Kiehl's-scrubbed babies. It's gotten to the point where I don't even want to walk up Madison Avenue; while my kid looks like Baby Old Navy exploded, I routinely bump into neighbors with children so perfectly preened in smocked dresses, rickrack-collared linen blouses, shiny Mary Janes with lace socks, and enormous bows in their styled hair. My mother-in-law gives us baby clothes that are marked Dry Clean Only. Unless they're linen, in which case yours truly gets to crack out the ironing board. I just want to hide. Boy, am I living in a crazy place. Maybe I should call Air Alaska. It all started when Josh got a call from Parker Elliott, his best friend from Harvard Business School. He knew Josh was sick of his job in San Francisco, dreading working the East Coast hours on the West Coast and getting up well before the ass-crack o'dawn. The bank that employed Parker was willing to make Josh an offer he couldn't turn down, so suddenly our laid-back California world was history. I was getting my PhD in art history at Berkeley right before Violet was born, but bagged after the Master's because a) of the impending stork arrival and b) I didn't know what the hell I wanted to do with a PhD. So when the call came for Josh, I was a perfectly transportable, abundantly educated, stay-at-home mom. I grew up in rainy Seattle so the storm-whipped weather "back east" never cowed me like most California residents; in fact, even though I'm a born-and-bred West Coaster, I actually always felt more at home with the northeastern vibe--crisp autumns lazing indoors and avoiding the sun due to my ultra-pale, all-too-easily-burnable complexion. When I met Josh and we started dating, he told me straightaway that he wanted to move back to his native New York to raise a family one day. I was game; I just didn't know that day would come so soon. I'd liked our shimmering, carefree San Francisco bubble, far from his socialite mom, cozy in our solitude between our close group of friends, our favorite haunts, and mellow routines. I always loved Manhattan when I visited every fall, but it was all a glistening October collage of Broadway shows, plush hotel rooms, designer sushi, and kissing in burgundy-leafed Central Park. The transformation from romantic tourist to entrenched inhabitant was bumpier than I had anticipated. The offer and subsequent arrangements happened so quickly; it seemed that within days I was loading up boxes, boarding a plane, and moving into corporate housing, all before I could even get used to the thought of it. The night we arrived, Josh ordered a Chinese feast, and after we tucked Violet into her Pack 'n' Play, we chowed take-out cartonloads of chow fun and General Tso's chicken, by the flickering light of nonaromatherapy candles. "Hannah?" he said, smiling over his chopsticks. "Yes, sweets?" "Thank you." He came over and hugged me and I blinked to release a lone tear, which he wiped away softly. Suddenly here we were: away from our friends, my family, my coast--and planted in a new world of the elite, his mom and fancy prep school pals included. My tear flow increased. "As if I don't already have enough salt from this meal," I laughed as he kissed me, wiping my cheeks. "I'm already the fattest girl in this city and the MSG intake ain't helping." "Shut up. You're beautiful." I looked at him gratefully and sighed. "We're going to be fine here," he consoled, stroking my hair. "Better than fine. You will love New York, Han, I swear." Joshie has always wanted me to adore his hometown as much as he did, and he's done everything he can to infuse me with his passion for it--from Woody Allen screenings in our den to museum binges when we visited, to excited samplings of his favorite foods (the perfect bagel, the best hot dog), and showing me the most sublime walks, to pointing out the most diverse, most intellectual, most kaleidoscopic array of eclectic, sometimes freakish citizens. He was a real die-hard, love-the-gray, eat-up-the-noise, relish-the-smell-of-streetcart-food New Yorker. Ever since I'd known him, Josh went back home every few months for his fixes, like a junkie filling up on the buzz and heat and lifeblood of the twelve-mile island he thought of as the center of the universe. He was so ecstatic to finally be back, and I was thrilled for him. But gone were the days of him rolling home at four thirty p.m., taking evening walks as a fam, and eating early dinners in our favorite holes in the wall. He had warned me that in this new job he couldn't cut corners and would be pretty much swamped, handcuffed to the office at least for a while. And I'd be navigating the rough waters on my own. Waters teeming with sharks. Kelly-bag-toting, Chanel-suit-wearing, Bugaboo-pushing sharks. "Bee is calling you on the cell tomorrow to meet up," Josh said, trying to lift my spirits. "Parker said she wants to take you to some children's clothes show or something. She'll introduce you to all her friends." "Okay," I said, exhaling and nodding. I wanted to be supportive to Josh. He had been so down at his old job and I had hated seeing him miserable. This was a chance at a fresh start for him, and I needed to match his enthusiasm. But just hearing the name Bee made me nervous. Excerpted from Momzillas by Jill Kargman All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.