It’s been kind of a top­sy-turvy week, so the image of a quaint sub­ur­ban house ripped from the earth and spun like Dorothy Gale’s twister-borne home feels about right at the moment:

As bizarrely invit­ing as the pic­ture is, it’s the details that make this book cov­er spe­cial: the fly­ing SOLD sign, the sen­si­ble brown shoe fly­ing off the foot one of the three fig­ures rat­tling around inside the sus­pend­ed house, the sheet of paper blown against the leg of anoth­er, the plaid lin­ing of the open trench coat… The detail of the illus­tra­tions trans­lates the care with which Eli­nor Lip­man has craft­ed the Jew­ish fam­i­ly at the heart of her lat­est nov­el. On Tur­pen­tine Lane fol­lows pri­vate school direc­tor of stew­ard­ship Faith Frankel as she strug­gles with an absent fiancée, a cloy­ing moth­er, an unfaith­ful father with illu­sions of artis­tic grandeur, and an office­mate whose friend­ship might be grow­ing a lit­tle too close…