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Overview
When the heat in Brooklyn climbs to a hundred, there's only one thing worse than being a delivery man for HomeMade Cakes. It's being a delivery woman for HomeMade. Because Anna, the feisty heroine of this earthy and irreverent novel, has to put up with things that her male co-workers can't imagine, from a boss who despises women to storekeepers who feel her up when they aren't trying to rip her off for the price of a carton of Chocos. As realized by Susan Jedren, Anna is a true representative of blue-collar, no-glitz New York, a valiant single mother whose attempts to keep her head above water - and her dignity intact - are both hilarious and uplifting. Let 'Em Eat Cake is a novel for anyone who has ever worked at a demeaning job and dreamed of dancing on the merchandise, a book as real as a corner bodega and as refreshing as an open hydrant in the middle of a scorching summer.Anna, a woman of our times, lives in New York City, where she has always lived--as the child of an abusive father, and now, as an abandoned wife and mother of two children. On a lark, she takes a job driving a delivery truck for Feelgood Cakes, each day wending her way through the inferno of New York and facing its sublime insanities with dignity.
Editorials
Publishers Weekly -
It's tempting to call Jedren's uncommon first novel a ``sympathetic'' portrait of a blue-collar working mother, but to do so would be a disservice to its narrator. Anna, a stubborn Brooklynite, doesn't require anyone's sympathy, and if her story at first seems outwardly mundane and banal-Anna's an unskilled laborer, separated from her husband and caring for two young sons-a closer look reveals a dynamic chronicle of everyday challenges. By day, Anna delivers bakery goods to neighborhood supermarkets while a trusted co-worker watches her kids. Her profession requires her to lift heavy packages and to collect payment in cash, so there's a constant threat of injury or robbery. She meets merchants who try to rip her off and even rape her, and her supervisors, who don't take kindly to a woman in a traditionally male domain, try to intimidate her into quitting. Yet a Bronx childhood and an abusive father have taught Anna tenacity; tough but never inhumanly so, she weathers emotional as well as physical pummeling. One questionable note sounds during the speedy wrap-up, as an entrepreneurial woman meets Anna and helps her land a white-collar job, but this story rings true all the way down to the heat rash that Anna gets from her ill-fitting men's uniform. Jedren has given readers a heroine-and a fiction debut-worthy of admiration. (Sept.)Library Journal
The lower-middle-class or working-class New Yorker doesn't get written about too often. Jedren's first novel is about Italian American Anna, who lives in Washington Heights and works as a snack-cake delivery person; it depicts her life on the route and off. Her on-the-job experiences are not always pleasant, and neither are her not-so-pretty co-workers. Still, the story is honest and believable until Anna joins the white-collar world, a move that just doesn't have the ring of reality. The characters are sometimes amusing, and the author does get the often helpless feelings of the single mother right. Recommended for women's fiction collections.-Barbara Maslekoff, Ohioana Lib., ColumbusBook Details
Published
July 1, 1994
Publisher
New York : Pantheon Books, c1994.
Pages
320
Format
Hardcover
ISBN
9780679433613