The War at Home: A Memoir Novel

By Nora Eisenberg

Book Overview

Lucy Lehman has a secret. Everybody loves her eccentric family but nobody knows what's 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 they'll 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 she's 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 Liar's 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 1950's, 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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0967952042
• ISBN13: 9780967952048
• Release Date: February 2002
• Publisher: Leapfrog Press
• Length: 210 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Brilliantly original, moving and funny

Nora Eisenberg has written a book about growing up that is both achingly moving and hilarious--quite a feat to pull off! The small vignettes about her childhood gave me entrance into her family and neighborhood, and more than that, into life in New York in the 40's and 50's. I loved the honesty and compassion, the beauty and humor on every page of the book. A delicious read!

"This Girl's Life"

The "War At Home" is a beautifully written menoir-novel of a child, Lucy, struggling to grow up in a chaotic home where her parents are not up to the job in which they find themselves. The author writes in the child's voice with sensitivity and humor, the challenges growing up in a disfunctional family. The bond between Lucy and her brother Nicky is particuarly poignant, as they each find different ways to cope with their family's plight. The author, also, is adept at presenting a balanced picture of her parents, their strengths and weaknesses that gives depth to the story. I loved this book, and reccomend it highly. It stays with you long after you are finished with it.

Amazing Book

This is an amazing book. It is the story of children who have to parent their parents. It made me cry but it also made me laugh over and over again. Once you start it, you can't put it down because you're rooting for the kids so hard. It is beautifully written and emotionally so true and satisfying. If you've experienced family violence, alcholism, drug addiction, or madness, you'll connect immemdiately; and if you haven't, you will feel like you have! If you liked This Boy's Life or Angela's Ashes, you'll love The War at Home.

The War at Home: A Novel by Nora Eisenberg

The War at Home: A Novelby Nora EisenbergThe War at Home is one of those rare books that stays with you for weeks after you read it. Its characters haunt you, particularly the brother and sister, Nick and Lucy, whose desperate struggle to stay together and to break free of their dysfunctional family, grips the reader with every page. This is a novel that evokes a time and place and politics distant yet dramatically present. It is a New York novel, set in the Bronx in the 1950s, charting the downward spiral of a father's return from World War II to provoke a "war" at home with his family and most tragically with his wife, Tippy. The character of Tippy, warm, talented and sadly vulnerable to his caustic rejection, is lovingly portrayed by the author, as is Nick, her son, whose left-wing politics protect him from the chaos around him. However, Lucy, her daughter, remains central to the story, remarkably surviving the tragedy of her family's dissolution. This is a sad story, but one that ends on a hopeful note, affirming as it does the strength and power of community. I strongly recommend it.

Eisenberg's Ashes: McCourt's "Angela's Ashes" Revisited

This book reminded me of Angela's Ashes, but I found it more real and more tender in its painful yet positive exploration of past and family. To read of darkness and bleak memories can affect us; to delve into fear, robed in humor and thoughtful levity, can change us. One of the best books I've ever read. If Opera misses this one, she's a fool.