Act of God

A Novel

By: Jill Ciment

Narrated by: Barbara Rosenblat

Jill Ciment’s books have been hailed as “stunning,” “powerful,” and “provocative.” Alice Sebold has called her works “beautifully written.” Now the author of Heroic Measures (“Smart and funny and completely surprising . . . I loved every page.” —Ann Patchett; “Brave, generous, nearly perfect.” —Los Angeles Times) has given us a contemporary noir novel that starts out a comedy of errors and turns darker at every hairpin turn.

It’s the summer of 2015, Brooklyn. The city is sweltering from another record-breaking heat wave, this one accompanied by biblical rains. Edith, a recently retired legal librarian, and her identical twin sister, Kat, a feckless romantic who’s mistaken her own eccentricity for originality, discover something ominous in their hall closet: it seems to be phosphorescent, it’s a mushroom . . . and it’s sprouting from their wall.

Upstairs, their landlady, Vida Cebu, a Shakespearian actress far more famous for her TV commercials for Ziberax (the first female sexual enhancement pill) than for her stage work, discovers that a petite Russian girl, a runaway au pair, has been secretly living in her guest room closet. When the police arrest the intruder, they find a second mushroom, also glowing, under the intruder’s bedding. Soon the HAZMAT squad arrives, and the four women are forced to evacuate the contaminated row house with only the clothes on their backs.

As the mold infestation spreads from row house to high-rise, and frightened, bewildered New Yorkers wait out this plague (is it an act of God?) on their city and property, the four women become caught up in a centrifugal nightmare.

Part horror story, part screwball comedy, Jill Ciment’s brilliant suspense novel looks at what happens when our lives—so seemingly set and ordered yet so precariously balanced—break down in the wake of calamity. It is, as well, a novel about love (familial and profound) and how it can appear from the most unlikely circumstances.

©2015 Jill Ciment (P)2015 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

“A gem of a book that ultimately focuses on the best parts about the human race. I kind of love it for that.” -My Bookish Ways

“Funny, scary . . . It’s human behavior that interests Ciment, and that runs the gamut from enjoyably ridiculous to surprisingly sublime in her tragicomedy of errors.” -Wendy Smith, The Daily Beast

“Ciment’s book is a compact, droll farce, light-hearted and pleasurable as a chocolate truffle, yet with a nugget of hard, somewhat unpalatable truths in the center . . . Ultimately, Ciment towers forth with her own brilliant voice . . . Her interweaving plotlines are so nimbly handled that every development seems simultaneously unpredictable, yet organically predetermined. The story might sometimes appear to be a massive clockwork, but it has the astonishing intricacy of the finest Old World municipal tower clock, where astonishing figures pirouette in and out of every niche . . . Ciment has the bracing mindset of Ambrose Bierce or Mark Twain, George Alec Effinger or Tom Disch.” -Paul di Fillipo, Locus Magazine

Barbara Rosenblat is a STAR

An entertaining story with a fantastic narrator. Full of hijinks and comedy, this novel will make you laugh out loud on the train. Highly recommend.

Growing fungus, shrinking plot

The overall subject of this book intrigued me, but I was mistaken. Instead of the plot having the fungus grow to encompass the whole city, country, then the world, the book somehow finds a way to shrink the plot the closer it gets to the end.

Interspersed with the shrinking fungus plot is a book about acting and an actor, and also NYC. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but this is not a book about fungus ending the world by any means. It could have been, but that’s obviously not what the author wanted to do.

It’s decently written and short enough that the shrinking plot wasn’t too painful, at least.

Not a Fan of Narrator

I like this author but not this narrator, whom I've heard before. I think it spoiled the book for me. She was far too dramatic to my taste.