Rhoda Rabinowitz Green’s Moon Over Mandalay

A romantic comedy, Moon Over Mandalay is set in the heart of rural mid-Western America during the early seventies. It is a light-hearted battle of the sexes, played out against a backdrop of the just-passed sixties, the pervasive whiff of marijuana and sounds of The Beatles, The Who, the Grateful Dead. About the pursuit of one’s dreams, love and romance, Moon Over Mandalay allows us a deliciously funny, yet forgiving, peek at our human follies.

Published, Busker Books (Toronto, Ontario, Canada)
Click to purchase. Read excerpts below.

Chapter 1 The Ménage

Moving day, Saturday, third week of August and hot. Southern Indiana hot, over ninety in the shade and bloated with moisture. April leans back against the fender of her '68 VW Beetle, watching Josh and his sidekick Hawkins, her soon-to-be housemates, unload furniture from a van. Humidity kinks her hair, its russet red aflame under brilliant sun; a tank top clings, wetness darkens its perfect white, traces her spine and beads her nose, causing granny specs to slip down its bridge. Arrived early June by way of Toronto, she's wondering, too late, what insanity prompted her back then to rent this thirteen-room monstrosity, this vacated nursing home for old folk, along with one, maybe two, other females, three males, a sheepdog, Melchior, and a neurotic cat, Elektra.
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Chapter 7 Dear Old Golden School Days

BOMBING DOWN THE NARROW COUNTRY ROAD, dashboard clock showing 8:15, a long stretch yet ahead and opening bell to sound at 8:30, April cranks up the car radio to blasting. The Who. Daltrey's sandpaper cockney, stuttering 'bout his g-g-generation. Drums, bass, Pete Townsend on guitar, rockin' and riffin' . . . blam blam blam blam blaam-da blam blam. A frenzy. Unbidden, her foot in sync presses more firmly down on the accelerator.
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Chapter 8 Benyamin

BENYAMIN STOPS APRIL MID - MEASURE. She expected criticism, not a moan. Worse, the moan, a deep-­-throated grunt, echoes within a tomb of silence. It's Wednesday, early evening, and she's still numbed by the shock of her first week and a half at Berryville. Seated at a librarian's desk in a corner of his studio, Benyamin leans forward, his eyes fixed downward, places his elbows on his knees, and holding his bald head between his hands, shakes it side to side. He lifts his gaze to peer out at the limestone campus, its woolly evergreens and shorn trees bare-­-branched netting against a chalky sky. His entire being exudes displeasure: Does the world really need another musician?
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