STRANGERS AND COUSINS

A ramshackle manse in upstate New York will go up for sale as soon as its owners finish putting on their daughter's wedding.

The fictional town of Rundle Junction has had bad luck with pageants—in 1927, a five-day drama of "Past, Present, and Future Performed Daily by its Residents" ended in a tragedy that recalls the real Hartford, Connecticut, circus fire some years later. Though there is a monument in town, the event is largely forgotten eight decades later except in wisps of memory drifting through the mind of ancient Aunt Glad, who used to have a sister named Joy and now has a great-grandniece called Mantha, who has named her dolls Fear and Sadness. Mantha's sister, "Clementine Esther Erlend Blumenthal, firstborn child of Walter and Benita Blumenthal, soon to become Mrs. KC Diggins...her college girlfriend's wife," is on her way home with her college friends Chana and Hannah (called "the Ch/Hannahs") to put on an alternative wedding ceremony—a pageant, it seems—that her mother, Bennie, is skeptical about. Bennie has plenty on her mind besides the wedding, as she and husband Walter (called "Stalwart") are not on the same page about the ultra-Orthodox Jews who have been moving into their area, their arrival having had a dire effect on property values, public schools, etc., in other commuter towns. Notwithstanding, as soon as this wedding is over, they plan to sell and flee. Cohen (No Book but the World, 2014, etc.) delights in her quirky characters, her melodious sentences, her exuberant narrative flourishes, and her peeks into the distant future. "Tonight, while just a few feet below them Walter and Pim pee side by side into the toilet, while more than two hundred thousand miles away the moon rolls across the sky like a lost pill, the baby mice are growing. Veering toward their respective fates." She rolls out her winsome, multicultural, elaborately orchestrated plot like a magic carpet. Some readers will jump on. Others may feel their inner sourpuss stirring to life.

One person's droll yet profound dramedy is another person's too-sweet cup of tea.