Lisa Zeidner Books

I have a roommate bearing the same name as your title. I believe in fate and karma. That names belong to one but share similarities with others. I am interested in learning more about your story of alexandra but this site is very,very vague. I have a feeling that this book could resemble her life in someone elses life. Please mail me a description of your book and where i can acquire a copy.

jtaylor420@shaw.ca

As a displaced native of the Brandywine Valley and a frequent visitor, I found this book to be a delicious portrayal of a unique area. The photography is generous, rich and superb. The reader feels as if he is truly a part of the spectacular rolling hills and historic homes that make the Brandywine a treasure. The text is informative and accurate. After reading this book, one will indeed have an "insider's" view of the region and its special composition of residents, history and natural beauty. Through many years, I have collected several volumes related to the Brandywine Valley. This one is by far my favorite. I have purchased several copies as gifts for friends who cherish the area as much as I, many of whom are long-time residents of the region. They all have related their pleasure and joy with the content of the book. In summation, an excellent effort which I highly recommend. Well done! William Sydnor

it seems, to get a book published these days. My guess is that 50% of the people who purchased this book did so because of the partly exposed boob on the cover. I know that there are books that are meant to be taken to the beach or the mountains for summer vacation and then left at the rental house because to bring it home would mean more weight in the car and lower gas mileage. But if the reader struggles to get through the first 30 pages of truly uninspired writing more than once, something is seriously wrong. At least if Ms. Zeidner could write, it might redeem the ridiculous "plot" line. Even the sex, which presumably enticed a number of people to buy the book is unexciting. The dust jacket says that the author is a professor of English at a respected university; one can only hope that she is a much better teacher than she is a writer.

I picked up this book pretty much at random at the bookstore recently and I was not disappointed. This is the story of Claire, who after losing her son to a freak accident can't seem to be able to cope with her grief. She is a travelling saleswoman who goes from hotel to hotel hoping to connect with people but just seems to slowly disconnect from her own world. After her husband admits to having had a fling at a conference, Claire sort of decides to just stay in hotels where she can sneak in for free and not go back to her old life. What follows is the interesting story of someone desperately trying to get to grips with her grief and her emotions. That goes from hooking up with near strangers to desperate phone calls to her therapist. It is a really good story, well written, with a daring and touching heroine. Not for everyone but recommended nonetheless.

This was my first look into the increasingly popular "chick lit" fiction arena. It's also become my last, because this was one terrible book. Words fail to describe, and I can't bring myself to recall the dull, lifeless, insipid text.

Should I allow one bad reading experience to keep me from the genre? Perhaps, if you consider the praise heaped on this clunker! Instead, if you're into semi-fictional accounts of women, adolescent or otherwise, stick with Jane Austen and Louisa May Alcott. They are referred to as "classics" for all the best reasons.

The only reason I did not give this book one star is because the beginning of it was very well-written. Had the tone and pacing remained the same, it could have been great. However, the middle and end of the book were atrocious! The author was attempting to wax philosophic in a gritty, detatched voice, but merely succeeded in writing a story completely devoid of plot or purpose. I agree with the reviewer who said that mothers who had lost a child would find this book insulting. Yes, everyone deals with loss in different ways, but bedding a teenager AND his father as a means to heal the pain is just disturbing. I kept hoping there was a padded room and a straight jacket waiting for her at the end of the book. I would have been satisfied if she'd ended up with a prescription for Xanax; after reading this book I feel like I need one!

Lisa Zeidner's "Layover" is lean and more than a little mean, largely because it's from the point of view of Zeidner's first-person protagonist, Claire Newbold, whose only child was killed in a car accident some time before the story begins. It's about battling the urge to escape from grief into cynicism, but don't be put off. Zeidner has a light touch and a sharp sense of humor, and she'ss anything but maudlin.

Claire is middle-aged, a traveling saleswoman of high-tech medical supplies. Early in the novel she begins a hotel-hopping journey of self-discovery that jeopardizes her job, marriage and sanity. What sets her off is a confession by her surgeon husband that he has had an affair with a woman colleague, and what helps bring her back from the brink are sexual encounters with an 18-year-old boy and then with the boy's father. Zeidner manages to make both encounters believable.

There's good dialogue and sharply amusing observations about American life at the end of the 20th century, but the biggest surprise is the skill with which Zeidner writes about sex. "Layover" is playfully and insightfully erotic, a quality most American writers can't seem to imagine, let alone capture on the page.

I didn't quite like Claire - she's smug and intolerant of human frailties, a vagabond with a big bank account - but I believed her grief and admired the way Zeidner handled her struggle to overcome the sense that she and everyone else are doomed to suffer in solitude. Claire wants to return to normal life but is plagued by the feeling that she knew her husband "so well I couldn't see him anymore. I knew him the way I knew myself. All of our years together - they weren't money in the bank. They were cash in a mattress that could burn."

"Layover" is funny and sad, smart and brave. Read it if you like fiction that explores what it means to be human.

You have to give Zeidner credit for how very different this book is from her close to bestseller Layover. Although there is one similar focus- how to con the system, either purposefully or "accidentally" (in Layover, it's hotel rooms, in Limited Partnerships it's banks...) the style is VERY different. More detailed, less first-person narration, more intertwined weaved in subplots. I have to wonder if the clunky name of this book isn't what kept people from buying more copies. In any case, it reminded me a bit stylistically of the author of "Virgin Suicides" and "Middlesex."

My complaints?
1) Overall, it needed a more romantic tone. The dry humor doesn't work so well in this book- it makes the characters lives seem unimportant.
2) The characters themselves came across as tacky.