Mordantly funny.
Colette Bancroft, Tampa Bay Times With a pitch-perfect narrative voice and plenty of humor, Eisenstadt captures the lives of her Mets-loving and Yankee-hating characters in vivid detail.
Booklist In her new novel, Swell, Jill Eisenstadt comes back to Rockaway, and this visit revolves around historical events of recent decades....Swell is anchored in real understanding ... Read moreof the people of Rockaway, what they went through in those years and their recourse to black humor.
Newsday Eisenstadt's detailed and eclectic novel takes readers to a dilapidated oceanfront house full of secrets, ghosts, and an old woman's cast-off tchotchkes....In this touching portrait of ordinary people grappling with the aftershocks of 9/11
memorials, uncertainty, death, and a new life
the emotional upheaval of a national tragedy leaves no one unaffected.
Publishers Weekly Comic, dark...layered with ghosts and guilt and demons. It plays with our notions of heroes and heroism, and jabs at our one-dimensional instinct to deify in the face of tragedy.
Casey Barrett, Village Voice Moving, dark, and funny.
David Gutowski, Largehearted Boy With tremendous tenderness, Eisenstadt captures the traumatized Rockaway of the early 2000s in swirling Technicolor....A whimsical portrait of a still-raw community.
Kirkus Reviews Swell combines comedy and tragedy, chaos and a longing for order.
Hillel Italie, Associated Press Show Less