PanThe New York Times Book ReviewHer 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 ... 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 ... 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...But the execution is too general to invest in the outcome and the result is a novel that reads like a summary of itself ... The narrative is padded with empty-calorie musings ... 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.
