An Organized Panic - Softcover

PRAISE FOR AN ORGANIZED PANIC by Patty Friedmann

"Her ability to create believable characters about whom the reader cares is steller. Even the lawyers who represent the Price siblings in their dispute are real people. Readers won't be able to put down this engrossing read until the final page." —Andrea Kempf, Library Journal

"Lip-smackingly irreverent! If you have to deal with pious relatives, you will love Cesca's triumph over her sanctimonious brother. Reading Friedmann is not like reading anyone else." —Dan Barker, co-resident, Freedom From Religion Foundation

"Like a mischievous taxidermist, Friedmann uses death as a backdrop to taunt the living with her unblinking wit."  —Johnny Rosenthal, Bad Santa 2

"Patty Friedmann's An organized Panic gets you thinking about family, spirituality, false prophets and holiday dinners while plunging you into the muggy climate of New Orleans and its undercurrent of dry wit and sensual satisfaction. Prepare for a visceral and visual journey that glides you into an ending of surprise mixed with a feeling of 'of course.' " —Marcia Kavanaugh, moderator, Informed Soruces

"In An Oganized Panic, Patty Friedmann is revisiting familiar turf—a dysfunctional family in Uptown New Orleans—but there's a difference in addition to the discerning pointed observations we've come to expect from her, this book offers welcome amounts of tenderness and humor, and a heck of a page-turner to bring the story to close." —John Pope, reporter and author of Getting Off at Elysian Fields: A Collection of Obituaries from the Times-Picayune

PRAISE FOR PREVIOUS NOVELS

“Elegant and unusual.” —New York Times

“Friedmann writes with a sensitivity that can touch the heart without falling prey to the sentimental.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Friedmann’s caustic style is hilariously fun.” —Booklist

“Brilliant, bitterly funny, and deeply scary.” —New Orleans Times-Picayune

“Warmth, sweetness, and humor...hooks the reader...Her quirky imagination, bolstered by striking images and witty asides, grants this novel a potent immediacy.” —Publishers Weekly

“Flows like cold water down a parched throat.” —Critique

“Maybe the greatest New Orleans author of the past quarter century.” —Failed Messiah

"Friedmann has perfected a deadpan voice that disarmingly addresses all sorts of bad behavior." —Gambit Weekly

"Walker Percy once wrote that 'the next Southern literary revival will be led by a Jewish mother, which is to say, a shrewd self-possessed woman with a sharp eye and a cunning retentive mind who sees the small triumphs and tragedies around her and has her own secret method of rendering it, with an art all her own.’ And that is totally Patty Friedmann.” —Signposts in a Strange Land

AN ORGANIZED PANIC sets sister against brother, born secular humanist against later-in-life evangelical Christian. The sibling squabble underscores a serious struggle, certainly, but this is another tale told in the darkly humorous Friedmann voice--and set in the New Orleans only a native would know. The manuscript took second place in the Faulkner-Wisdom competition in late 2012 and could be her best story telling yet. Friedman will challenge you to think about our own belief system as she "....opens our conversation on the sympathetic athiest narrator."

Ronald Price runs a lucrative crime-scene cleaning operation called JesusCleanup. His sister, narrator Cesca Price, is baffled: they grew up in a thoroughly secular household. When Cesca and her mother Trisha have Thanksgiving dinner at Ronald's house, a meal marked by praises to Jesus and recipes loaded with sodium from canned soups, mother Trisha has a stroke, and Cesca embarks on struggles with her brother. Cesca is a painter of national repute, and in the coming weeks she has to juggle responsibility for her mother, a coming show at the Getty, and an interview with PBS host Tevor Souriante —plus a nascent friendship with her mother's doctor Michael Rosenthal. When Trisha dies, Ronald wants to use his half of the estate to buy a huge empty church to start a ministry. Is Ronald a charlatan, which means he is a crook but at least a man of reason—or is he a good Christian but no longer the man of reason who grew up with Cesca? Either way, she says no. So Ronald sues her—unsuccessfully—to remove her as executrix. Two days later she does her interview with Tevor Souriante, still fuming about her brother, not knowing the camera is rolling. Bolstered by her romance with Michael, Cesca finally realizes that Ronald prizes money above all else. In the end, Ronald and Cesca will have to face each other down in court, and each will have to try to prove the other is not above board. Has Cesca libeled Ronald and ruined his livelihood and thus owes him millions? Or is Cesca right, that he dupes innocent people, and it's okay to make it public? That resolved, what will the Price family be without Trisha?