The Easy Hour: A Novel of Leisure

By Leslie Stella

Welcome to the Easy? life! When overworked, underpaid women?s wear retail slave Lisa Galisa (the rhyming name is only the beginning of her agonies) suddenly becomes the personal assistant to an infamous Chicago socialite, she accidentally, hilariously, becomes the toast of the town. Catapulted into the role of trendsetter, this frustrated working-class girl seizes the opportunity to unleash some South Side mayhem on a gullible society that hungrily embraces the next new thing.? Lisa offers them the Easy? lifestyle, encouraging her new crowd to shake it up and party alongside janitors, fry cooks, and bricklayers. Soon she has the upper crust patronizing dive bars, wearing cheddar-hued polyester, and grooving to the bewitchingly canned melodies of easy listening?the emperor?s new music. And the social set is having it. But as the Bridgeport-born-and-raised charlatan begins to buy into her own fraud, longing to leave behind the land of retail hell and Polish saah-sidges? for life among the beau monde, her eccentric family and a mysteriously handsome janitor with a penchant for astronomy dip into their own bag of tricks to keep her on the right side of sanity, if on the wrong side of the tracks. Join Lisa Galisa and the rest of these charming oddballs at the Easy Hour, where they find the best remedy for a hard existence is a little easy listening.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0609809725
• ISBN13: 9780609809723
• Release Date: April 2003
• Publisher: Three Rivers Press
• Length: 265 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.0" x 0.6" x 5.9"

Customer Reviews

The Smartest Chic Lit EVER

All you Bridget Jones fans, prepare to meet Lisa Galisa!! This book is HILARIOUS and smart and fun. Leslie Stella knows how to tell a story that hooks you right in. From the amazingly creative setting of Fishman's department store to the subplot of Lisa's friend Tim's job, you finish the book (in too short a time!) and want MORE. And anyone from Chicago will love reading her takes on our cultural rituals.Read this and pass it on!!

Witty Sarcastic Fun!

The Easy Hour is the story of Lisa Galisa, a lazy store clerk who ends up as a personal assistant to a rich Chicago socialite. The book is not real strong on plot but it's so witty and funny it didn't really matter to me. Lisa's family is a riot and every time her sister did I psychic reading("pet" psychic reading, that is) I thought I might die laughing. Lisa is often very unlikable but at least that made her real and I liked how honest she was with herself. I highly recommend this book as a light "get your mind of things" kind of book...read it instead of watching a Friends episode -- it's funnier and better wriiten :-)

can i give this book more than 5 stars?

Wow! By far the funniest book I have read. Very smart, clever, interesting, fun. How many more ways can I say that I just loved this fun, fun book? I am recommending it to friends and strangers alike. If you have ever spent time working in a high-end service/customer relations type job this is a must read! Our hero struggles on the edge of the world of the super-elite, wondering how she can fit in with her taste for the finer things and her blue-collar background.

Almost TOO hilarious

This is another well-written, witty "rage-against-the-machine" novel by the super-talented author, Leslie Stella. If you enjoyed her first book, "Fat Bald Jeff", you know what I am talking about and you'll adore this one as well. Stella's writing and characters have really grown since the first book. Sentence after sentence is jam-packed with humor. Guaranteed, you'll laugh out loud reading this one, too.

Self-stylers rule

People who create their own personas are gifts to life, entertainments to those of us without the flair or consistency to forge one-of-a-kind selves. Imagine a whole gallery of self-styling characters, a gang of corrigible misfits each with a manic sense of fashion and depressive sense of self. That's what Leslie Stella gave us in FAT BALD JEFF and now in this second novel, starring high-caloric, low-esteem Lisa Galisa. Watching Galisa "hork" her way through identity crises without ever missing a fashion beat is catharsis itself and feels great. There's a driving story line here, but it doesn't really matter. The fun-heaping platters of it-is in the characterization, the arch dialogue, the situations. Stella has the eye for telling particulars, the hip and campy,including in this case a parade of outrageous retroglam. That cutting wit so peculiar to Brit writers is in evidence here, but with an American-style compassion that leaves you something to smile about.