Fic­tion

The Late, Lament­ed Mol­ly Marx

  • Review
By – December 22, 2011

Mol­ly Marx is dead, dead, dead, but she doesn’t feel it and isn’t ready to let go. She looks down from the Dura­tion” on the world she left and the peo­ple she loves with a decid­ed­ly oth­er-world­ly per­spec­tive but with her sense of humor still alive and kicking. 

This breath-of-fresh-air nov­el is part chick­lit, part mur­der mys­tery, and all charm. The mys­tery boasts a unique detec­tive, Mol­ly, her­self, from up above. She can’t quite remem­ber exact­ly how she died, but now that she’s in the Dura­tion for the dura­tion, she has noth­ing but time to try to fig­ure it out. Could she have been killed by her phi­lan­der­ing hus­band, jeal­ous sis­ter, secret boyfriend? Could it have been one of the com­pet­i­tive femme-fatales who peo­ple her per­fect-seem­ing life? Per­haps she wasn’t mur­dered at all but sim­ply the vic­tim of unfor­tu­nate acci­dent. She trains an ana­lyt­i­cal eye on the doings down below as well as a pro­tec­tive one on her beloved young daugh­ter as she tries to make sense of it all and grad­u­al­ly learns to under­stand what real­ly matters. 

With a cast of char­ac­ters pur­pose­ful­ly and hilar­i­ous­ly stereo­typed, a touch of irony and some down-to-earth phi­los­o­phy, Koslow’s nov­el thor­ough­ly entertains.

Michal Hoschan­der Malen is the edi­tor of Jew­ish Book Coun­cil’s young adult and children’s book reviews. A for­mer librar­i­an, she has lec­tured on top­ics relat­ing to lit­er­a­cy, run book clubs, and loves to read aloud to her grandchildren.

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