Much Ado About Jessie Kaplan — Paula Marantz Cohen

Carla Goodman's life in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, is a little bit stressful these days. Her doctor husband is frazzled, her son's teachers say he needs Ritalin, and she's in the throes of planning her daughter's bat mitzvah. But it's her sweet widowed mother, Jessie Kaplan, who really has Carla worried, for Jessie has suddenly “remembered” that she was Shakespeare's Dark Lady of the Sonnets in a previous life. Can even the famed Dr. Leonard Samuels, psychiatrist and author of the self-help book, How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love My Mother-in-Law, help with a problem like this?

Witty, engaging, and wickedly observant, Much Ado About Jessie Kaplan is an unpredictable tale of love, loss, and family rites of passage.