Zeidner~ Love Bomb

Zebra Reads
May 2, 2023
4 min read

Love Bomb is a modern fiction "love story" published in 2012 by Lisa Zeidner.

Lisa Zeidner is a contemporary American author. She was born in 1955 in Washington DC and she currently lives in New Jersey. So, she is in her late 60s, though her pictures on-line all look like she’s 40, honestly.

I really can’t find much out there on her. She is the director of the MFA program in creative writing at Rutgers and she seems to write regularly for the American Scholar and Salon, but I don’t see a Wikipedia page on her or any kind of self-run website.

Love Bomb was her 4th fiction book, but she also has two books of poetry published and a new non-fiction book about writing fiction. Her books are fairly spread out over many years, so it seems like she writes more as a hobby than a career, but she also appears to be a fairly private person.

What it’s about: This is definitely a book about love and all of the many ways it can take shape within human relationships. There is pure honest love and definitely obsessive love and selfish love. Love in this novel is manifested in a myriad of ways all radiating outward from the hijacking of a small wedding at a suburban home, by a very scorned woman, who demands nothing but an apology. The kicker is that no one knows who she is and she is wearing a gas mask to cover her face, so the guests need to try to figure out who it is that needs to apologize and what exactly they need to apologize for. She takes 60 hostages and for the next seven hours the stories of all of the main cast of characters unfolds in order to attempt to literally and figurative diffuse the situation.

My take: Books about weddings are not high on my priority list, just having ended my own marriage in what might be the most epic of epic fails. I really did not want to read a book about a fairytale wedding that looked like it might be derailed only to end up being a perfect, lived happily ever after, story. But, that is actually what I got, and I really liked it. Zeidner does a fantastic job of casting stones everywhere. She bludgeons the idea of “true love” or “love at first site” and then turns around and perfectly portrays both in descriptions of one couple’s marriage. The good guys don’t win and the bad guys don’t lose, but then some good guys do win and some bad guys do lose. She does a very nice job of portraying life and love as a journey and each step along the way getting us where we need to be at that moment. Sometimes we miss our opportunities. Sometimes we fall into the right place at the right time. Sometimes life just is, it’s not fair or just or even unfair or unjust, it just is.

Who should read it: Older adults (and by older I mean 30s on up). Especially anyone who feels like they have lost in love and is tired of people of telling them their time will come and to just give it another chance. I can identify. And what is great about this book is that it does say that, but it doesn’t say that and it says both in ways that are acceptable. But, I would particularly like to think anyone who has had an affair or who has been cheated on in a relationship should read it. It does not condemn infidelity, nor does it condone it. Rather it forces you to think about it in terms of all of the things gained and the things lost by it and how a bit of fate can change all of that in an instant.

Who should not read it: Teens and young adults, generally, and probably anyone particularly sensitive to adult themes. There is a lot of sex talk in the book and often it is crude, with all the slang terms we tend to avoid in polite company. But that is not why I think teens and young adults should avoid it (they’ve certainly heard of that and worse in their lives). Rather I just don’t think it would have as much meaning to them because this story seems most powerful for those who have loved and lost in multiple rounds. It might be a decent book to read once young and then again every ten years to see how your perspective of it has changed with all of your experiences though. But, generally speaking the story presented is mature in a way that goes beyond simple language and blunt sex talk, and ends up needing an accumulation of experiences to appreciate.

Bottom Line: A short, entertaining, funny, read that puts love and life in the perspective of a journey rather than of a single event.

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