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Madeleine Altimari is a smart-mouthed, rebellious nine-year-old who also happens to be an aspiring jazz singer. Still mourning the recent death of her mother, and caring for her grief-stricken father, she doesn't realize that on the eve of Christmas Eve she is about to have the most extraordinary day - and night - of her life. After bravely facing down mean-spirited classmates and rejection at school, Madeleine doggedly searches for Philadelphia's legendary jazz club The Cat's Pajamas, where she's determined to make her on-stage debut. On the same day, her fifth grade teacher Sarina Greene, who's just moved back to Philly after a divorce, is nervously looking forward to a dinner party that will reunite her with an old high school crush, afraid to hope that sparks might fly again. And across town at The Cat's Pajamas, club owner Lorca discovers that his beloved haunt may have to close forever, unless someone can find a way to quickly raise the $30,000 that would save it.
As these three lost souls search for love, music and hope on the snow-covered streets of Philadelphia, together they will discover life's endless possibilities over the course of one magical night. A vivacious, charming and moving debut, 2 A.M. at The Cat's Pajamas will capture your heart and have you laughing out loud.
"Starred Review. By the fourth sentence of the first page, readers will fall in love with debut author Bertino; delighted adoration of Madeleine will take another half page. This assured, moving, brilliantly funny tale of music, mourning, and off-kilter romance entrances with its extraordinarily inventive language." - Library Journal
"While the jazzy intentions are noble, the toe-tapping, bebopping tone Bertino aims for feels forced - a melody we can see Madeleine shimmying along to, but not ever quite hear for ourselves." - Publishers Weekly
"As the hours pass, the various storylines thread together.While some will find this seasonal sweetness charming, others will find it maddeningly contrived." - Kirkus
"Vibrant...Bertino's characters are spot-on, and her special brand of humor brings each one to life in this fresh and charming tale." - Booklist
"2 A.M. at The Cat's Pajamas is a recipe box full of wonders. With a wildly entertaining cast of characters, Marie-Helene Bertino soars through her native city of Philadelphia, zeroing in with great beauty, wit, skill and love on the exact moments in time that change our lives forever." - Hannah Tinti, author of The Good Thief
"Each sentence is a pop-up box: first delightful for its sweet music, then profound with the shock of truth. This is a dazzling book."- Eleanor Henderson, author of Ten Thousand Saints
"Read this book to see a debut author doing something really special, crafting a story where human kindness meets up with an inhospitable world and real magic happens in the aftermath." – Kevin Wilson, New York Times bestselling author of The Family Fang
This information about 2 A.M. at The Cat's Pajamas was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Marie-Helene Bertino is the author of Parakeet, 2 A.M. at The Cat's Pajamas, and the story collection Safe as Houses. She was the 2017 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Fellow in Cork, Ireland. Her work has received the O. Henry Prize, the Pushcart Prize, the Iowa Short Fiction Award, the Mississippi Review Story Prize, and fellowships from MacDowell, Sewanee, and New York City's Center for Fiction, and has twice been featured on NPR's Selected Shorts. She teaches creative writing at New York University and Yale University and lives in Brooklyn, New York.
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