Valerie Block Don't Make a Scene

Don't Make a Scene

Valerie Block

Ballantine, Jul 31 2007, $24.95

ISBN: 9780345461858

Overall thirty nine year old New Yorker Diane Kurasik seems contented with her life. She has enjoyed managing the Bedford Street Cinema and loves living in the Village. However as she nears forty, she loses her rent control apartment and has recently found her work boring.

A decade ago architect Vladimir Hurtado Padryn fled Cuba, but though he lives in New York and his wife in Havana with their seventeen years old son, she refuses to divorce him. When he and Diane meet they are attracted to one another; he honestly tells her his marital status. As she decides what the leading ladies of the screen would do in her predicament, she adheres to the principles of single female life in the Big Apple: DON'T MAKE A SCENE regardless of what she encounters and keep reminding herself that it is NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS as she sleeps on the couches of friends and family, and finds an apartment that she cannot afford.

This entertaining look at relationships in New York uses film references as a form of chick lit asides that make for an amusing relationship drama. Diane is a terrific protagonist who believes life imitates classic movie scenes especially romantic ones though her version never quite works out. Fans will enjoy this fine Manhattan romp in which Diane knows that if she wants affordable living she needs to go out to the wastelands known as the other boroughs, Jersey, Long Island, or Westchester.

Harriet Klausner