Twelve Rooms with a View: A Novel

How would it feel to go overnight from living in a trailer park to a twelve-room apartment overlooking Central Park in a landmark Victorian building?

This is what happens to housecleaner Tina Finn, who, with her sisters, Alison and Lucy, suddenly comes into possession of the Livingston Mansion Apartment at the Edgewood. The Finn sisters inherit the $11 million property from their estranged alcoholic mother, but they aren’t the only siblings vying for it. Their mother’s wealthy second husband, Bill—who died just three weeks before Tina’s mother—has two sons. And they are furious at the thought of losing the apartment that’s been in their family for generations.

Tina moves into the nearly vacant, palatial space to solidify her claim to it, but she soon discovers that Bill’s sons aren’t the only ones who want her out. The building’s other residents are none too pleased by her presence either. In fact, the co-op board has designs on wresting control of the apartment from both sets of children.

As Tina fends off all the people who want to evict her (or worse), she starts to get involved in her neighbors’ complex lives. There’s the mercurial, eccentric botanist who may be either a friend or an enemy; the self-absorbed, randy son of the co-op board president, whose friendship without benefits Tina tries to curry; the large, chaotic family whose depressed teenage daughter becomes Tina’s ally and spy; the ghost Tina hears crying at night in her apartment’s secret room . . .

In this entertaining yarn by acclaimed playwright, screenwriter, and author Theresa Rebeck, we follow Tina Finn—a woman both comical and compelling, well intentioned and a bit of a thief—as she begins to love her new home, discovers traits to admire in people she’s only just met, and realizes, finally, her place in her family and the world.