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An Almost Perfect Moment
Binnie Kirshenbaum. HarperCollins: 2004 (hardcover). ISBN: 0060520868. 288 pages.
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An almost perfect title for a novel that comes freakishly close to perfection. Set in Brooklyn "on the cusp of the great age of Disco," Kirshenbaum's story features a pair of unusual star-crossed lovers: sixteen-year-old Valentine Kessler (a sweet but spacey Jewish girl who happens to be a dead ringer for the Virgin Mary), and her socially-challenged math teacher John Wosileski (he lives with his parents).
Obstacles to their blissful union include Valentine's best friend Beth Sandler, who despairs of Valentine's increasing descent into "weirdness," and John's lukewarm girlfriend Joanne Clarke, the bitter, malevolent biology teacher who is determined to hang on to her only available male specimen. If anyone in this novel deserves to be bitter, it would beMiriam Kessler, Valentine's mother, who has lost the love of her life in Valentine's faithless father. But Miriam takes unabashed pride in her beautiful daughter, delights in daily mah-jongg with The Girls (three bejeweled and bouffanted Brooklyn ladies who function like a Greek Chorus to the drama of the novel), and focuses on the pleasures of eating herself into oblivion. The wonder of this novel is its eerie balance of happy and sad, of hope and despair, delusion and acceptance-it's as delicious as disco and doughnuts, but as deep as death and the Virgin Birth-both of these last being elements which are soon to rock this conventional community.
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