The War at Home

The War at Home by Eisenberg, Nora. Paperback edition. ISBN: 9780967952048.

Lucy Lehman has a secret. Everybody loves her eccentric family but nobody knows whats really going on. Her mother is a respected dance therapist, able to calm the most incorrigible delinquents in the Bronx. Her father, just returned from WW2, is a working class hero. On a good night theyll eat snack food for dinner, do the dishes in the tub while the kids are taking a bath and sing old labor songs. But on a bad night, when dad comes home in one of his dark moods and mom retreats to her bed, surrounded by the empty bottles of pills shes charmed out of neighborhood pharmacists, the insults fly along with the furniture. Told with wit, understanding, and remarkable pluck, The War at Home is a warts-and-all autobiographical novel in the tradition of The Liars Club, in which an inseparable brother and sister thrive in spite of the crazy household created by their parents and learn to raise themselves to survive. The War At Home evokes the more innocent world of New York City in the 1950s, where lonely teenagers can find a safe haven in the Botanical Gardens and the Bronx River speaks of freedom as surely to two Jewish run-aways as to Huckleberry Finn.