LONG CHALKBOARD & OTHER STORIES GN

Here is a triptych of modern life as it is lived by men and women of a certain age: the baby boomers. Jenny Allen's clever, offbeat narratives and Jules Feiffer's playfully expressive drawings coax to the surface the hidden anxieties, familiar frustrations, and downright fury that we try to convince ourselves that we don't feel. The characters who move through these stories are reckoning with lives that didn't turn out quite the way the expected. On the other hand what they didn't expect turns out to be all right anyway: a little redemption bubbling up in the kitchen where "Judy's Wonder Chili" is made; or hiding in the folds of an origami crane, waiting to be found by the children's book writer in "Something Happened"; or revealing itself on the surface of the well-used chalkboard of the title tale.