IN 2000, THE NEW YORKER excerpted Lucinda Rosenfeld's first novel, "What She Saw. . . . " Along with the story, the magazine ran a full-page photo of Rosenfeld sitting on a Brooklyn stoop in a strappy tank top, an image that helped seal her fate as a lit chick. Et tu, New Yorker? But Rosenfeld's work had meat on the bone. "What She Saw. . ." belonged to a coterie of novels published within a year of one another, including Myla Goldberg's "Bee Season" and Thisbe Nissen's "The Good People of New York," smart books about smart girls becoming women. Over the course of three subsequent novels, Rosenfeld stood out for her garrulous narrators who sharply examined the bonds of sisterhood and friendship. Her work has long been a balancing act between satire and farce, between observation and cliché. But with Rosenfeld's fifth novel, "Class," the story of an overbearing mother in a gentrifying neighborhood, the scales have tipped. At the risk of being the person in the balcony shouting "Play 'Free Bird'!" I will say that "Class" had me missing the old Rosenfeld. Karen Kipple is floating along in her marriage to Matt, an unobservant and underemployed Marxist liberal with whom she has "fairly decent if infrequent sex." Karen is devoted to two things: Hungry Kids, the nonprofit she helps run, and seeing to it that her 8-year-old daughter, Ruby, has the best education money can't buy. Over the past two years, while not working on an op-ed about childhood nutrition (a peculiar amount of time to develop an opinion on a topic that is also one's job), Karen has been congratulating herself for sending Ruby to an integrated public school. Alas, it's not the "Benetton ad from the '80s" she hoped it would be. Using Ruby as a shield for her idealism, Karen secretly cherishes the one blondhaired child in her daughter's class, speculates on the ability of poor families to "recognize the Evite format" and lives in fear of processed foods and twerking. But her real fear, as it well should be, is being perceived as a flagrant racist. Perhaps the most self-aware thought she has over the course of the entire novel is this: "College-educated white liberals were nearly as terrified of being seen as racists as they were of encountering black male teenagers on an empty street after dark." When a child from a nearby housing project (he "never met his father, if such an individual could even be identified") becomes violent in class and seems to threaten Ruby, Karen guiltily and unceremoniously yanks her daughter out of the school. A couple of white lies later and Ruby is enrolled in a more prestigious school, where Karen is faced with a whole new ilk of intolerable parent - the kind intent on teaching the lunchroom workers to cook with olive oil instead of Crisco. ("It's been a fairly steep learning curve," one mother smiles "knowingly.") This is the point at which either Karen should inspire empathy or the novel's satire of privileged motherhood should manifest. We should view this fresh crop of hackneyed harpies through her eyes. But Karen is so cringe-inducing; the enemy of my enemy is my friend. She does mean well. Her and Matt's love for their daughter, though unflaggingly saccharine (pet names include "whippersnapper" and "Scooby Doobie"), is the most effective part of the book. When Ruby is ditched by a classmate, Karen takes it personally because she "had never been good at separating her own history of social rejections from those of her young daughter's." This is the kind of deeper truth for which Rosenfeld is known. Ruby herself is the only sympathetic character, which may have been Rosenfeld's intent - this pea of innocence oblivious to the childlike adults swirling around her - but any texture she adds is flattened by the weight of her mother. Karen can't make it five pages without being tormented by crippling selfconsciousness over appetizers, furniture, shopping, racial politics or her own daughter's name. A Puerto Rican child's designer shirt triggers a mild conniption fit: How could her mother afford to spend "that kind of dough on her daughter's clothing? Or was it simply that Michelle took pride in her daughter looking cute and, like all mothers, splurged on occasion, putting the charges on Visa? But if the latter was true, was there an aspirational element to the selection? Or had the polo-player logo long since ceased to signify a desire to hang out with the kind of people who actually played polo? And how did that relate to the fact that Mia's current best friend (Ruby) was Caucasian? Or did Michelle not think about these things?" This could be a piece of observational art in its own right, but Rosenfeld's novel isn't zoned for that. The premise of "Class" is a strong one - a take-no-prisoners racial romp and commentary on modern motherhood as told by a descendant of Tracy Flick - and Karen's shenanigans in the second half quicken the pace. But the execution is too general to invest in the outcome and the result is a novel that reads like a summary of itself. Karen connects with a college friend, a stand-in for Christian Grey who comes with a private plane, blue eyes "like two little swimming pools" and a taste for Tiffany, and who smells of "citrus and cedarwood" - an indication of nothing except, perhaps, a moth problem. Matt and Karen refer to the local housing project with a French accent, as in "pro-jay," yet Karen "still hadn't determined if it was offensive or funny." What she does not allow for is that it may be neither. The only way we know something is funny is because a character has laughed at it. "Class" is full of giggles suppressed, escaped and rising in windpipes, in response to lazy cracks about (say) Bill Cosby. The narrative is padded with emptycalorie musings: "That was the thing about clichés, she'd learned - and yet somehow kept not learning. They were often true. Just as often, they weren't." Karen tries "not to judge how other people raised their children, but in truth, she rarely missed an opportunity to do so" and "never considered herself to be a particularly competitive person. But even if winning wasn't her life's goal, it was also true that she hated to lose." Sometimes you feel like a nut, sometimes you don't. For satire to run as it should, the reader needs specificity of detail and the sure presence of the author behind the curtain, in full control of the seemingly chaotic experiment. Both are missing here, and as a result Karen feels more one-dimensional than the subjects of her scrutiny. Unlikable and conflicted characters, specifically female ones, are to be cherished so long as they have reason. But from the start, Karen sends unbelievable emails, obsesses over other families and denies a play date with one of Ruby's sorely needed friends because of her own spiteful beef with the kid's mother. She is jealous of or despises every woman she meets with the exception of the ones she fetishizes. All of this would be unpleasant and yet none of it would be quite so problematic if "Class" didn't keep hinting that we are supposed to be on Karen's side as she attempts to "live in accordance with the politics and principles she believed in." We are supposed to be discomforted as we recognize our own worst selves in her. We are supposed to believe she is one of us, only snapped. Alas, the novel provides no entry point for that argument. If "Class" is a bomb meant to be thrown at the hypocrisies of gentrified life, it's as if the bomb went off in Rosenfeld's hands. The protagonist's daughter is a pea of innocence oblivious to the childlike adults around her. SLOANE CROSLEY is the author, most recently, of the novel "The Clasp."

Karen Kipple is a privileged fortysomething who works for a nonprofit called Hungry Kids. Her husband, a former lawyer, is working on a start-up for fair housing, and her daughter, Ruby, happily attends the local public elementary school, Betts, which educates students of all races and socioeconomic situations. At a glance, Karen seems to be living a blessed life-educated at an Ivy League college, working on her passion to provide for the less fortunate, married to a partner who shares her values. But she begins to question everything when a young, troubled black child gets too close to her white daughter. When another privileged white student leaves the school, Karen feels her daughter needs to be moved as well. Her husband starts to distance himself from Karen, noting her hypocrisy and her racist feelings. Ruby is now attending a very upscale public elementary school that is almost 100 percent white, but she is unhappy there. Karen struggles to overcome her hypocrisy and decide what kind of person she is. The intent to place a mirror in front of Karen and others like her; living a granola life but keeping themselves at a remove from the people they essentially feel sorry for is the large theme of this satirical book. Unfortunately, it's extremely difficult to become interested. Karen is unlikable from the beginning and never really sheds that mien. Verdict Though Rosenfeld's (The Pretty One) latest picks up momentum when Ruby moves to her new school, it's unlikely any reader would be willing to wade through the lengthy saga of this unpleasant woman to get to that point.-Brooke Bolton, Boonville-Warrick Cty. P.L., IN © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

*Starred Review* Karen Kipple suffers mightily from liberal guilt. The white, upper-middle-class New Yorker is mom to first-grader Ruby, who attends the neighborhood public school. Karen is smugly proud of the fact that she keeps Ruby at Betts, where she is in the minority, instead of pulling strings to send her to nearby Mather, where the student body is almost all white and wealthy. But Karen, a fund-raiser for a children's hunger charity (something else she's self-satisfied about), simultaneously pats herself on the back for her inclusiveness while fretting over the increase in racial incidents happening at school. After a friend removes her daughter from Betts over an altercation, a chance moment with a rich person's garbage gives Karen the opportunity to falsify her way into the Mather district and this act of defiance sends Karen's entire life spiraling out of control. Karen is a flawed and unlikable character, to be sure, but a certain sector of readers will identify with her cringing all the while. Rosenfeld's sharp and searing look at race and class in urban America will make quite an impression on readers and will become an excellent book-discussion selection. It will make readers uncomfortable, but for all the right reasons.--Vnuk, Rebecca Copyright 2016 Booklist

On the surface, Karen Kipple has much to be content about. But despite her job as a fund-raiser at a nonprofit in New York, a spacious condo that she and her hardworking husband own thanks to some inherited money, and a bright third-grade daughter, Ruby, Karen isn't exactly happy. At first, it seems clear that her dissatisfaction stems from her insistence on white-liberal perfection: avoidance of artificial chemicals in foods, commendable work, and Ruby's attendance at a racially diverse neighborhood school, Constance C. Betts Elementary. But when a classmate of Ruby's transfers out of Betts to a school with mostly privileged white students, Karen's ideals begin to crack. Karen duplicitously moves Ruby to the wealthier school, launches an affair with a billionaire donor, and breaks the law in what she describes as "the most selfless act of her nonprofit career." The story is uncomfortable and excellently handled by Rosenfeld (I'm So Happy for You); it invites questions about faithfulness and philanthropy, one's obligation to those less fortunate, and what it means to be middle-class in an unequal society. Agent: Maria Massie, Lippincott Massie McQuilkin. (Jan.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

This take-no-prisoners satire puts politically correct urbanites in their place for real.Karen Kipple and her husband, Matt, both career activists in the nonprofit sector, have righteously enrolled their daughter in their zoned public elementary school, where the white populationhovered around 20 percent. However, Karen, like some other white parents, is concerned that she's sacrificed quality education for diversity. Among other dubious accomplishments, her daughter can recite the wedding date of Coretta and Martin Luther Kingbecause every month was Black History Monthexcept when it was Latino History Month. A scuffle on the playground between a Jayyden and a Maeve further divides the parents along racial lines: What that kid needs is a serious whupping versus With all due respect, violence is not the answer to violence. Karen is so beached in the mud of responsible domesticity that it has affected even her dreams, the majority of them so prosaic that she sometimes felt embarrassed when she woke up. But this pill of a woman, depicted in deadpan, grimly hilarious detail, is about to cut loosestarting an extramarital affair with a billionaire she's canvassing for her nonprofit, stealing gas bills out of the trash so she can move her daughter to a whiter public school, then performing an insane Robin Hood maneuver that could land her in that most racially imbalanced environment of them all. Rosenfeld (The Pretty One, 2013) depicts Karen with such pitiless disdain that it's a welcome surprise when the plot gives her a chance at redemption. From its James Baldwin epigraphWhite people cannot, in the generality, be taken as models of how to liveto the final pages, in which Karen decides not to inquire about the fate of young Jayyden to avoid appearing like one of those well-meaning, college-educated white liberals who fetishize the deprivations of the underclass, this book takes dead aim and doesnt miss. Comin at you with a copy of Karl Marxs Capital in one hand and a raisin bagel in the other. Right on, Rosenfeld. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.