The Lady with the Moving Parts by Merrill Joan Gerber eBook

praise

“The Lady With the Moving Parts is an extremely funny and wonderfully sensitive novel . . . readers will thoroughly enjoy this warm and zesty novel.” —Lewiston Maine Daily Sun

“Self-discovery has brought Jewish Maris to the height of Arabian delights . . .” —The Los Angeles Times

“The style is light, beguiling and readable: the humor downright heartwarming.” —Chicago Tribune

“Gerber’s warm, compassionate, witty look at the lifestyles of liberated women is bound to awaken glints of insight in many . . . Gerber introduces as colorful and ingratiating a group of women as we have yet encountered in feminist literature. Their revelations—trenchant, funny, often poignant—stir Maris to come to terms with her repressed sensuality. How a Jewish heroine rediscovers the joys of marriage as she performs a belly dance to the accompaniment of an Arab drummer . . . is related by Gerber with zest and sensitivity. Her richly satisfying narrative is informed by an acute ear for the nuances of family life and a wryly observant eye cast on those with the middle-aged sexual itch.” —Publisher's Weekly

“Six women in Los Angeles, including a belly dancer and a vaguely dissatisfied wife and mother, meet regularly for group therapy. The married woman, despite her conventional appearance and habits, turns out to have an open mind and self-possession—virtues that the group comes to appreciate when various crises, mostly sexual, threaten to undo them all. Merrill Joan Gerber writes funny and accurate dialogue, which she laces with artful descriptions—serpentine and syncopated—of her veiled heroine dancing to cymbals and drums.” —The New Yorker

about the author

Merrill Joan Gerber is a prize-winning novelist and short story writer. Among her novels are The Kingdom of Brooklyn, winner of the Ribalow Award from Hadassah Magazine for “the best English-language book of fiction on a Jewish theme,” Anna in the Afterlife, chosen by the Los Angeles Times as a “Best Novel of 2002” and King of the World, which won the Pushcart Editors’ Book Award.