David Rothman's Lelya Dorche and the Coney Island Cure is one of the first COVID-19 novels and it is an adventure, a family drama, and very funny. This is the New York of real people: denizens of Queens and Brooklyn, not Manhattan day traders, not Brooklyn hipsters, but the immigrants, the Jews, the Muslims, and Hindus. Rothman has imagined a melting pot of a novel with a Roma witchdoctor, a Filipino nurse, a Jewish funeral home director, and an alcoholic Ukrainian smuggler in a race against time to save lives outside the official realms of government and capitalism. Like the Coney Island Cyclone that makes an appearance in the early pages of the book, once you get on this ride, you wouldn't want to get off even if you could.-John Talbird, author of The World Out There
"Sometimes life puts you in the darkest corner," and what corner could be darker than a vicious virus which (at that point) had no cure or even treatment? Lelya Dorche and the Coney Island Cure is bright, and moving, illustrating how will, magical thinking, and the power of love can overcome the insurmountable. Guided by his sister's ghost, warm, pragmatic Andrew risks it all to save his family. With sharp prose, an endearing cast of characters, and the haunting background of Coney Island, David Rothman's novel reiterates the biggest lesson that came with the global pandemic: Love is absolutely everything.-Claudia Zuluaga, author of Fort Starlight
Rothman treads a fine line between reality and fantasticality when he portrays a mental health break, as many people's mental health problems were exacerbated during COVID and by grief, too. Andrew, the narrator, is semi-unreliable, and yet, he is also smart, sensitive, and capable in many ways. I also like the way it shows how people in desperate situations will search out whatever they think might help, whether there is much evidence of that fact or not. It feels like a book rooted in parental love and the gap between helping and hurting and being overbearing in the process.-Mike Hilbig, author of Judgment Day & Other White Lies
2023-09-21
In Rothman’s debut novel, a father goes to the ends of the earth to save his son from Covid-19.
In early April 2020, the world has changed a lot over the last month. Covid-19 has descended upon New York with a fury, a fact that no one knows better than Andrew Gruber. He’s the assistant director of a funeral home in Jackson Heights, Queens, which is currently the “epicenter of the epicenter” of the pandemic. Things were grim enough when it was just Andrew’s neighbors getting sick, but now his severely asthmatic son, Miro, has tested positive for the disease (his 85-year-old parents might have it, too). After exhausting the powers of modern scientific medicine—the doctor’s advice is simply to wait and see—Andrew visits Lelya Dorche, a Roma witch doctor who works out of an abandoned post office in Coney Island. “Helped save my grandfather from polio when he was a kid,” Andrew’s best friend, Cleon Jones, assures him. “That lady should get the Nobel Prize for Medicine.” However, Lelya will only help Andrew if he agrees to travel to his wife’s native Bulgaria to procure twenty liters of rare Macedonian pine sap. How exactly will Andrew do that when every flight to Europe is grounded? If he wants to save his family, he’ll have to figure it out quickly. Rothman captures the sense of panic and desperation that characterized the first few months of the pandemic, when parents would make any conceivable sacrifice, however incredible, to protect their child. The tone is a mix of breathless urgency and absurd comedy, as when Andrew is given a hen to take with him on an illegal biplane flight: “They forgot to give us food for the bird!” complains his pilot. “How often do they eat?” Some readers may not be ready for a Covid-19 novel, but Rothman does an excellent job reminding us of the human stories at the center of the crisis.
A big-hearted novel about parenthood in a pandemic.
