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Overview

How would it feel to go overnight from living in a trailer park to a twelve-room apartment overlooking Central Park in a landmark Victorian building?
 
This is what happens to housecleaner Tina Finn, who, with her sisters, Alison and Lucy, suddenly comes into possession of the Livingston Mansion Apartment at the Edgewood. The Finn sisters inherit the $11 million property from their estranged alcoholic mother, but they aren’t the only siblings vying for it. Their mother’s wealthy second husband, Bill—who died just three weeks before Tina’s mother—has two sons. And they are furious at the thought of losing the ...
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Overview

How would it feel to go overnight from living in a trailer park to a twelve-room apartment overlooking Central Park in a landmark Victorian building?
 
This is what happens to housecleaner Tina Finn, who, with her sisters, Alison and Lucy, suddenly comes into possession of the Livingston Mansion Apartment at the Edgewood. The Finn sisters inherit the $11 million property from their estranged alcoholic mother, but they aren’t the only siblings vying for it. Their mother’s wealthy second husband, Bill—who died just three weeks before Tina’s mother—has two sons. And they are furious at the thought of losing the apartment that’s been in their family for generations. 

Tina moves into the nearly vacant, palatial space to solidify her claim to it, but she soon discovers that Bill’s sons aren’t the only ones who want her out. The building’s other residents are none too pleased by her presence either. In fact, the co-op board has designs on wresting control of the apartment from both sets of children. 

As Tina fends off all the people who want to evict her (or worse), she starts to get involved in her neighbors’ complex lives. There’s the mercurial, eccentric botanist who may be either a friend or an enemy; the self-absorbed, randy son of the co-op board president, whose friendship without benefits Tina tries to curry; the large, chaotic family whose depressed teenage daughter becomes Tina’s ally and spy; the ghost Tina hears crying at night in her apartment’s secret room . . . 

In this entertaining yarn by acclaimed playwright, screenwriter, and author Theresa Rebeck, we follow Tina Finn—a woman both comical and compelling, well intentioned and a bit of a thief—as she begins to love her new home, discovers traits to admire in people she’s only just met, and realizes, finally, her place in her family and the world.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly
Playwright and novelist Rebeck (Three Girls and Their Brother) takes a lighthearted look at the often dark world of New York City real estate. Spunky 32-year-old narrator Tina Finn is at her mother's funeral when she learns of her possible inheritance of an $11-million Central Park West palace. While she's been slogging it out as a trailer-dwelling cleaning lady, her somewhat estranged mother has gone from blue collar to living in eccentric splendor with her new husband, Bill. Tina's unbelievably unpleasant sisters push her into moving into the apartment before their mother's cold in the ground. Enter Bill's sons, who want possession of the apartment, which is, after all where they grew up. Soon, a full-on real estate war erupts, and the building's quirky residents take sides. Throw in a possible ghost and romantic interludes, and the plot jogs along, if slowed by the occasional drawn-out scene. This should find a nice slot on the cozier end of the Manhattan real estate fiction canon. (May)
Library Journal
Playwright Rebeck's second novel (after Three Girls and Their Brother) revolves around the crazy world of Manhattan real estate. Hours after her mother's funeral, cash-strapped Tina Finn finds herself installed as the new tenant in the 12-room apartment her mother shared with her second husband, Bill, also recently deceased. Tina's sisters, both sharks, realize they stand to inherit this fabulously expensive Upper West Side residence. Loser Tina is elected to stay and live in the apartment to strengthen their legal claim...except no one wants her there. The building's residents, especially the co-op board, hate the lowbrow Tina and her sisters. And then there are Bill's sons, who vehemently contest the Finn sisters' rights to the space. VERDICT This dark comedy is wildly uneven, although not without its bright spots. Urban libraries might find more interest.—Andrea Young Griffith, Loma Linda Univ. Lib., CA
Kirkus Reviews
A young woman is recruited by her sisters to "squat" in a high-priced Manhattan co-op while they settle their inheritance claim, in playwright Rebeck's second novel (Three Girls and Their Brother, 2008). Rebeck's background as a dramatist is immediately apparent in her trenchant dialogue and in the monologue-ready ruminations of her first-person narrator, Tina Finn. Tina, whose immediate past featured a trailer, a junkyard boyfriend and several arrests, learns at her mother's funeral that she and her sisters Lucy and Alison are about to inherit the Livingston Mansion, Apt. 8A, a palatial slice of Central Park West real estate. Her late stepfather, Bill Drinan, an ailing, alcoholic recluse, had apparently inherited 8A from his first wife, Sophia. Bill left 8A to his second wife, former housecleaner Olivia, the Finn girls' mother, whom he preceded in death by only a few months. Olivia and Bill had occupied the smallest, shabbiest rooms in 8A, and had, judging from cases of expensive red wine and vodka left behind, literally drunk themselves to death. The apartment's formal kitchen is lined with moss cultivated by Len, the weird botanist neighbor. The apartment's showiest rooms have stunning views but no furniture. In the wee hours, Tina is awakened from her own drunken stupor by other claimants to the property: Pete and Doug Drinan, Sophia and Bill's sons, who grew up in 8A, have barged in to remind her that she has no legal right to occupancy. As the estate battles escalate, Tina is urged by the oh-so-controlling, tightly wound Lucy to ingratiate herself with the co-op board, who are hostile toward the interlopers, not least because Bill was (gasp!) Irish. A storeroom of poignant memorabilia, a secret passage between apartments and a ghost whose voice echoes behind the walls amp up the whimsy. Although the scenes are impeccably handled and laughs abound, the ending seems arbitrary and abrupt. This would make a great play.

Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780307394163
  • Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
  • Publication date: 5/4/2010
  • Pages: 352
  • Product dimensions: 6.60 (w) x 9.60 (h) x 1.16 (d)

Meet the Author

Theresa Rebeck
Theresa Rebeck
THERESA REBECK is the author of the novel Three Girls and Their Brother. Her plays include Our House, Bad Dates, Omnium Gatherum (a Pulitzer finalist), The Scene, and Mauritius, which won Boston’s prestigious IRNE and the Elliot Norton Awards and premiered on Broadway in 2007. Rebeck lives with her husband and two children in Brooklyn, New York.

Read an Excerpt

Twelve Rooms with a View

A Novel
By Theresa Rebeck

Shaye Areheart Books

Copyright © 2010 Theresa Rebeck
All right reserved.

ISBN: 9780307394163

I was actually standing on the edge of my mother’s open grave when I heard about the house. Some idiot with tattoos and a shovel had tossed a huge wad of dirt at me. I think he was perturbed that everyone else had taken off, the way they’re supposed to, and I was standing there like someone had brained me with a frying pan. It’s not like I was making a scene. But I couldn’t leave. The ser vice in the little chapel had totally blown— all that deacon or what ever he was could talk about was god and his mercy and utter unredeemable nonsense that had nothing to do with her—so I was just standing there, thinking maybe something else could be said while they put her in the earth, something simple but hopefully specifi c. Which is when Lucy came up and yanked at my arm.

“Come on,” she said. “We have to talk about the house.”

And I’m thinking, what house?

So Lucy dragged me off to talk about this house, which she and Daniel and Alison had clearly been deep in conversation about for a while, even though I had never heard of it. Which maybe I might resent? Especially as Daniel obviously had an interest but no real rights, as he is only Alison’s husband? But I was way too busy trying to catch up.

“The lawyer says it’s completely unencumbered. She died intestate, and that means it’s ours, that’s what the lawyer says.” This from Lucy.

“What lawyer?” I ask.

“Mom’s lawyer.”

“I have a hard time believing that that is true,” Daniel said.

“Why would he lie?” Lucy shot back at him.

“Why would a lawyer lie? I’m sorry, did you just say—”

“Yes I did. He’s our lawyer, why would he lie?”

“You just said he was Mom’s lawyer,” I pointed out.

“It’s the same thing,” she said.

“Really? I’ve never even heard of this guy, and I don’t know his name, and he’s my lawyer?”

“Bill left her his house,” Lucy told me, like I’m some kind of total moron. “And since she died without a will, that means it’s ours. Mom has left us a house.”

This entire chain of events seemed improbable to me. I’m so chronically broke and lost in an underworld of trouble that a stroke of luck like an actual house dropping out of the sky might be true only if it were literally true and I was about to fi nd myself squashed to death under somebody else’s house, like the Wicked Witch of the East. Surely this could not mean that. I continued to repeat things people had just said. “Bill left her his house?”

“Yes! He left her everything!” Lucy snapped.

“Didn’t he have kids?”

“Yes, in fact, he did,” Daniel piped up. “He has two grown sons.”

“Well, did he leave them something?”

“No, he didn’t,” Lucy said, fi rm. Daniel snorted. “What? It’s true! He didn’t leave them anything!” she repeated, as if they’d been arguing about this for days.

“The lawyer said it wouldn’t matter whether or not they agreed to the terms of their father’s will,” Alison noted, looking at Daniel, trying to be hopeful in the face of his inexplicable pessimism about somebody leaving us a house.

“If the lawyer said that, he’s a complete moron,” Daniel informed her. “I called Ira. He’s going to take a look at the documents and let us know what kind of a mess we’re in.”

“It’s not a mess, it’s a house,” Lucy said, sort of under her breath, in a peevish tone. She doesn’t like Daniel. She thinks he’s too bossy. Which he is, considering that we didn’t all marry him, just Alison.

So we took a left out of the cemetery in Daniel’s crummy old beige Honda and went straight into Manhattan to the lawyer’s offi ce. There was no brunch with distant relatives and people standing around saying trivial mournful things about Mom, which I didn’t mind being spared. It would have been hard to fi nd anybody who knew her anyway,
but I did think that the four of us would at least stop at a diner and have some eggs or a bagel. But not the Finns. We get right down to business.

Before noon we were squashed around a really small table in a really small conference room in the saddest Manhattan offi ce you ever saw. The walls were a nasty yellow and only half plastered together; seriously, you could see the dents where the Sheetrock was screwed into the uprights. The tabletop was that kind of Formica that looks vaguely like wood in somebody’s imagination. I was thinking, this is a lawyer’s office? What kind of lawyer? The overweight receptionist wore a pale green sloppy shirt, which unfortunately made her look even fatter than she was, and she kept poking her head in, fi rst to ask us if we wanted any coffee and then about seven more times to tell us that Mr. Long would be right with us. Finally the guy showed up. His name was Stuart Long, and he looked like an egg. Seriously, the guy had a really handsome face and a good head of brown hair, but the rest of him looked like an egg. For a moment it was all I could concentrate on, so I was not, frankly, paying full attention when Lucy interrupted him in midsentence and said, “Can you tell us about the house?”

“The house?” said the lawyer, seriously confused for a second. And I thought— of course, they got it wrong, of course there is no house.

“Bill’s house,” Alison explained. “The message you left on our machine said Bill left Mom a house, and the house would be part of the settlement. You left that, didn’t you leave that—”

“Well, I certainly would not have left any details about the settlement on a machine— I spoke to your husband, several times actually. Is that what you mean?”

“Yes, we spoke, and you told me about the house,” Daniel interrupted, all snotty and impatient, like these details were really beneath him. I could see Lucy stiffen up, because Daniel clearly had told her and Alison that he had gotten “a message,” when in fact he had been having long conversations with this lawyer that he had no right to have, much less lie about.

“You mean the apartment,” Egg Man insisted.

“Yes, the apartment.” Daniel was still acting above it all, as if he had a right to be annoyed.

“So it’s not a house,” I said.

“No, it’s an apartment. Olivia was living there. Up until her recent death.”

“Recent death— that’s an understatement,” I said.

“Yes, yes, this is I’m sure overwhelming for you,” the lawyer said.

He had very good manners, compared to everyone else in the room.

“But I take it from your questions that you’ve never seen the apartment?”

“Bill didn’t like us,” I said. “So we weren’t allowed to visit them.”

“He was reclusive,” Alison corrected me. “As I’m sure Mr. Long is aware.”

“Mom told me he didn’t want us to visit because Bill didn’t like us,” I said.

“That’s ridiculous,” said Alison.

“Could we get back to the point?” Lucy said. “What about this place— this apartment? We’re inheriting it, right?”

“Yes, well, the apartment was directly willed to your mother,” Egg Man agreed. “Because her death came so soon after her husband’s, the title was never offi cially transferred, but that will most likely be considered a technicality.”

“And it was her house,” Daniel reminded him. He was really stuck on this idea that it was a house.

“Technically it is, as I said, specifi cally included in the estate,” our round lawyer repeated. “Why don’t you let me walk you through this?”

“Why don’t you just tell us how much the place is worth?” Lucy threw in.

Mr. Long blinked but otherwise ignored her poor manners. “Obviously it’s not possible to be specifi c about the worth of the property until we have a professional evaluation,” he informed the room.

“You really don’t know?” Lucy persisted. “Like, it could be worth ten dollars or ten thousand dollars or a million dollars, but you don’t know?”

Before Egg Man could answer, Daniel tried to rip control of the meeting back to his side of the table. “She’s just a little impatient,” he said, smiling. “Sweetie, maybe we should let Mr. Long—”

Lucy rolled her eyes at this. “Just a ballpark, Daniel sweetie,” she shot back.

Mr. Long cleared his throat, clearly uncomfortable. “Well, I guess I could—”

“Yes, why don’t you,” I said, trying to be nice, because I was feeling a little embarrassed by the way the others were acting. Also, I really wanted him to give up a number. “Just a ballpark,” I said, smiling brilliantly, sometimes that’s all a sad, round lawyer needs: a pretty girl smiling at him. I thought Lucy was going to gag, but it did the trick.

“A ballpark. A ballpark,” he said, smiling back at me. “I don’t know— eleven million?”

There was a big fat silence.

“Eleven million?” I said. “Eleven million what?” I know that sounds stupid, but what on earth was he talking about? Eleven million pesos?

“Eleven million dollars,” he clarifi ed. “That of course is almost a random number, there’s really no way of knowing. But it is twelve rooms, with a view of Central Park, on a very good block. I think eleven million would be considered conservative. In terms of estimates.”

So then there was a lot more talk, yelling even, people getting quite heated, worried about things that hadn’t happened and might not happen but maybe were happening or had happened already, and the solution
to all these things that no one understood, apparently, was for me, Tina, to move into that big old eleven- million- dollar apartment right away. Like that very day.

So it was odd how that happened? But that’s where I ended up.

Continues...

Excerpted from Twelve Rooms with a View by Theresa Rebeck Copyright © 2010 by Theresa Rebeck. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Sort by: Showing all of 3 Customer Reviews
  • Posted April 9, 2010

    lv2read

    Rebeck spends 475 pages setting up the story, and then 9 pages resolving the issues. Some of the solutions are implausible, and all are too abrupt. After spending pages and pages on the problem, why not give the solutions a little more substance? I was highly disappointed in the ending.

    2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.

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  • Posted June 16, 2010

    disappointing, abrupt ending

    The story is kind of whimsical and kookie about 3 sisters who think they have hit the jackpot when they "inherit" a posh Manhattan apartment on the Upper West Side. But the author spent 470 odd pages creating the story and then in 9 pages ends the story. Some of the resulting solutions are impossible, or at the very least implausible. I was greatly diaappointed with this book.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted July 20, 2010

    No text was provided for this review.

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