Estimated read time: 2-3 minutes
This archived news story is available only for your personal, non-commercial use. Information in the story may be outdated or superseded by additional information. Reading or replaying the story in its archived form does not constitute a republication of the story.
Disreputable developers, environmental devastation, overwrought characters and skillful farce. In Rattled, first-time novelist Debra Galant covers the same satirical terrain as the more famous Carl Hiaasen (Tourist Season, Skin Tight, Skinny Dip). Compared to Hiaasen, however, Galant shows greater compassion for her suburban characters.
Rattled tells the tale of how a driven mom painfully learns what matters in life. Heather Peters is a fit, firm, stay-at-home mom who is determined to create the perfect life for her lawyer husband, Kevin, and their third-grader son, Connor. That life includes a giant SUV and a colossal McMansion.
Heather's dream house is part of a brand new development carved from the wilds of New Jersey by a sleazy developer. But there is a snake lurking in her paradise: the endangered timber rattler.
Mayhem and mommy warfare follow headstrong Heather as she attempts to mold her world and her hapless family into domestic perfection. It is no coincidence that Heather was raised in Nutley, N.J., Martha Stewart's childhood town.
Although the book is very funny, Galant uses Rattled to comment on a number of serious issues -- the competitive parenting style of many yuppies, for example, who obsessively schedule their children's activities without actually seeing the real child. And like many yuppies, Heather has a lust for tony consumer goods.
Yet, Heather is a surprisingly sympathetic figure. She lies, she overspends, she covets, she connives, she embodies all our worst traits. Yet the reader roots for her.
But not at the expense of the area's longtime rural residents, such as Harlan White and Agnes Sebastian, whose quiet lives are being destroyed by developer Jack Barstad. One might say the developer is the book's true snake. Except that would insult the rattlers.
Galant crafts a clever plot that builds to a screamingly funny climax. It is so well-constructed that P.G. Wodehouse, the master of madcap humor, might approve.
Rattled
By Debra Galant
St. Martin's, 244 pp., $23.95
To see more of USAToday.com, or to subscribe, go to http://www.usatoday.com
© Copyright 2006 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.
