Plumbersutra

Book excerpt: After several years in Europe, author Cecilia Kochanowski returns to the United States with her husband and two daughters. Sadly resigning themselves to the fact that they cannot afford to return to a Manhattan home¿and while wasted on jet lag¿Kochanowski manages to buy a faded yellow cottage in a sleepy village nestled in the Hudson Valley. When moving day actually comes, Kochanowski wishes it away, even though she spent months anticipating the momentous occasion. All aspects of the move back to the States are a shock: the commute to work is long, the local varmints voracious, and the cottage nearly blows up from a gas leak only five days after the family moves in. Though a product of the American suburbs, Kochanowski quickly realizes that she no longer remembers how to live in the country of her birth¿even less so than her Polish husband. Will their newly purchased but aging house ever feel like home? As they negotiate their prejudice against their new home, the family confronts the village zoning board, a cowboy plumber, and a coven of petty bureaucrats on their chaotic odyssey of home renovation, uninformed gardening, and sporadic child rearing in the witty memoir Plumbersutra A string of...observations on such suburban conundrums as first-time home buying, commuting, buying an SUV, roof-remodeling and, of course, plumbers. Kochanowski takes obvious delight in turning her wry eye to the unique priorities of the 'burbs, having just moved there from Manhattan's Upper West Side. Breezily insular, Plumbersutra traces her lateral shift from entitled urbanite to entitled suburbanite who's gone native even while preserving the threads of her detached irony. The characters assisting in and standing in the way of her American Dream-Janusz, her dutiful Polish husband, less a stranger to these circumstances than she; her crabby neighbor; her fellow train commuters; her maverick plumber, Dave-are, for the most part, skillfully rendered and often genuinely funny, and her glee in setting up punchlines and delivering zingers is infectious. -Kirkus Discoveries