In a suburban New Jersey great room, an aggrieved woman wearing a wedding dress, a gas mask, and reinforced steel-toe work boots upstages the bride and takes the guests hostage—a disproportionate percentage of whom happen to be Jewish psychotherapists all too eager to offer competing diagnoses: “They would think she was schizophrenic just on the basis of the outfit. The outfit alone screamed inpatient.” Lisa Zeidner’s deliciously dark and very funny fifth novel, Love Bomb (Sarah Crichton, $26), has received rave reviews in both The New York Times and The Washington Post; Jonathan Yardley compared her to the late, beloved novelist Laurie Colwin. The book’s warmth and hilarity are scaffolded by Zeidner’s crisp sentences and her sharp observations of suburban life.
