Amazon.com Review Try to imagine a cross between a Shakespeare tragedy and a Philip Roth comedy, with a few Stephen King horrific touches thrown in. Allison Pennybaker and Solomon Beneviste know when they announce their engagement that her Episcopalian parents and his Jewish mother will have some adjusting to do, but the wedding planning results in a nuclear-family meltdown. Daniel Evan Weiss' earlier book, The Roaches Have No King, was the best book written about a cockroach since Archy and Mehitabel. He's got a brilliant touch with over-the-top details. Product Description Daniel Evan Weiss took on the fierce conflict between humans and insects in his last book, The Roaches Have No King. Here he turns to the struggle between Jews and Christians joining together in holy matrimony. When Allison Pennybaker and Solomon Beneviste announce their engagement, the trouble begins: the Pennybakers plan a church wedding they can't afford, while Solomon's mother traces the bizarre Beneviste genealogy all the way back to the Spanish Inquisition as a nuptial present to the couple. This comic tragedy chronicles the ill-fated engagement as it slides into the chasm between the faiths, then crashes and burns. From Publishers Weekly Like the best black comedy, Weiss's third novel, (after Hell on Wheels and The Roaches Have No King) leaves the reader sated yet queasy. In a bizarre and biting story, the doomed engagement of Solomon Beneviste unfolds through the journals of the two women who love him most: his fianc and his mother. When her Jewish son proposes to WASPy Allison Pennybaker, Miriam Beneviste finds herself excluded from the wedding plans. To keep busy, she decides to make a family tree as a wedding present and goes looking for the gritty brown of her ancestors' lives. As she obsessively researches and records 500 years of religious persecution, beginning with the Spanish Inquisition, she becomes determined that her ambivalent son reclaim his Jewish heritage. Meanwhile, her future daughter-in-law has her own fixations, including wedding registry decisions and her family's latent anti-Semitism. As the book races towards the wedding and a fatal fire that is mysteriously hinted at on the first page, it becomes more dark than funny. Although the supporting characters, including the bridegroom, are one-dimensional, Weiss's two narrators are complex, unselfconscious and believable. Together, they provide a compelling, if grotesque, reason to remain true to one's identity. Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Unreview think The Swine's Wedding is brilliant, important, and telling. It is compulsively readable. It is beautifully constructed. -- Fay Weldon, author of Worst Fears Hardcover. English. Serpent's Tail. 1996. ISBN: 9781529152852. 216 pp. Good in laminated hardcover. Book No: 83416
