Loving Edith - Hardcover

Like Carolyn See and Alice Hoffman, Tannen (Easy Keeper) adds sparkle and the magic of coincidence to ordinary people's lives. Here she delivers a cosmopolitan novel that is both literate and romantic, an alloy of intellect and instinct. Edith Seagrace, a 21-year-old college student from upstate New York, chooses to spend a summer in Manhattan, away from her adoptive parents. With the help of her grandfather and, unbeknownst to her, her birth mother, Lulu, Edith finds an apartment in trendy TriBeCa and lands a summer internship at sophisticated UBU magazine-whose editor, Martin, may be her biological father. Unaware that Lulu and UBU figure in her history, Edith views all this as simply good luck. She's innocently amazed at how well Martin and the magazine's seasoned staff treat her, and she dismisses Lulu-a flighty artist who subsists on the kindness of wealthy friends (and occasionally on the tastier contents of garbage cans)-as a vulgarian. Because of her ignorance, Edith unwittingly breaks hearts as her youth and potential awaken in her admirers-who have long been lonely and self-absorbed-a powerful parental pride tinged with longing. People view her presence alone as a gift. While Tannen advances this sentimental notion, she invests each scene with classic New York glamour as she knits uptown and downtown, the publishing and art worlds, highbrow and lowbrow into one captivating read.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

When eccentric, nomadic Lulu learns that Edith, the daughter she gave up for adoption 21 years ago, plans to spend the summer in Manhattan, she immediately arranges for Edith to stay in the loft upstairs. Lulu plans to reveal herself to Edith at the appropriate time and place; however, Edith first glimpses Lulu as she's wolfing food off of her companion's dinner plate and then sees her rummaging through the garbage in search of material for an art exhibition. Sensing Edith's repulsion, Lulu remakes herself to win her daughter's approval. Indeed, many of the lonely sophisticates who run the hip literary magazine where Edith is working as an intern seek Edith's approval, including the ailing editor-in-chief, who may or may not know that he is her father. Author Tannen shapes her quirky, engaging material with the same sure hand she exhibited in After Roy (1990) and Easy Keeper (1992). Her novels are such fun to read that when we encounter her serious themes and her fresh, inventive storytelling, it's like getting a bonus. Joanne Wilkinson