Fear and Yoga in New Jersey

By Debra Galant

Book Overview

Nina Gettleman-Summer, a New Jersey yoga teacher, should be calmly guiding her high powered students through their savasanas and their chakras. Instead she is worried about... everything: her new... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0312545274
• ISBN13: 9780312545277
• Release Date: March 2009
• Publisher: St. Martins Press-3PL
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.5" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

fast paced and fun from start to finish -- don't meditate on it - buy it

The title grabbed me and then I couldn't put the book down. I read it in 24 hours annoyed whenever I HAD to stop to feed the kids, or walk the dog, or lie to the husband about some money thing. Great insight into all the characters, male and female, young and old. Lots of good quirky stuff too. I'm sending my husband to Newark Airport with a camera ASAP! I loved it!

Funny, barbed & poignant

Debra Galant mines the same suburban-satire vein that made her "Rattled" so much fun, but this time she leaves McMansion country for latte land -- the upscale, PC, urban-émigré precincts of Essex County. It's a milieu she seems to know well, and her characters are complex, rich and believable. One set piece, at an over-the-top bat mitzvah, is irresistible -- magical realism in a catering hall.

wry and poignant

FEAR AND YOGA IN NEW JERSEY blends Debra Galant's already trademark blend of humor and stark observation, both brought to life by her protagonist, Nina, whom readers can't help but empathize with. Anyone who has ever gasped in horror as yet another tasteful, chain coffee shop goes up--while guiltily partaking of its wares--will see themselves in Ms. Galant's somehow real yet farcical characters. But FEAR achieves something more, much as Ms. Galant's first novel, RATTLED, did. The story builds to moments of real emotion, even transformation. You will probably chuckle aloud while reading. But you'll be made to feel something greater, too.

Seinfeld Lives!

This is a novel that most readers will find irrestible for the wry wit with which it portrays a dysfunctional family as its individual members try to make sense of a world that puts them through a bizarre week in their lives. Galant has very craftily woven a shaggy dog story - or rather five shaggy dog character arcs, one for each principal character - that engender just the right type of laughs, and criss-cross each other nimbly, as in the best of farces. The whole endeavor is very "Seinfeld"-ian, especially in that it's about NOTHING and it works. In many ways it's an even a stronger novel than her previously published "Rattled," though it's in similar voice...and that voice is human, sardonic, and delightfully funny.

Fear and Yoga in New Jersey by Debra Galant

New Jersey has a lot going for it--beautiful beaches and farms, easy access to New York City and Philadelphia, great shopping malls, pro football, casinos, and Princeton University. New Jersey is the home state of Jerry Lewis; Lauryn Hill; Frank Sinatra; Meryl Streep; Bruce Springsteen; my niece, Sophie and my nephew, Johnny Elvis. Author Debra Galant has written two highly entertaining novels about life in the Garden State: Rattled; and Fear and Yoga in New Jersey. (I haven't read Rattled yet, but I plan to check it out soon.) Fear and Yoga in New Jersey is about a frazzled yoga instructor who is going through a rough patch. Her husband's job is outsourced to the Phillipines, her son wants to become a Chassid (not that there's anything wrong with that), and her parents flee to her already chaotic home to avoid a Florida hurricane. Debra Galant is often compared to Florida satirist Carl Hiaasen. Although I could never get through any of Hiaasen's book, I devoured Galant's Fear and Yoga in New Jersey in just one day. To me, Galant is more like an American Fay Weldon (Life and Loves of a She-Devil), or a female Tom Perrotta (Little Children). If you would like to read more books that take place in New Jersey (and who wouldn't?), check out these titles: *Goodbye, Columbus by Philip Roth *Joe College by Tom Perrotta *Looking for Bobowicz: A Hoboken Chicken Story by Daniel and Jill Pinkwater