Dream Job: Wacky Adventures of an HR Manager by Janet Garber; lulu.com; (c) 2016; ISBN 9781483-447476; 159 pages.
By Donald H. Harrison
SAN DIEGO — Melanie is a supervisor in a human relations office at an urban hospital in this work of fiction. What goes on there would be hard for anyone besides author Garber to imagine. One employee, trying to avoid her boss, sleeps under Melanie’s desk. A doctor is a serial groper. The first head of HR is always angry and perhaps unsurprisingly winds up mysteriously dead. The second head of HR is a would-be sexual predator.
Outwardly, Melanie keeps her cool as she deals on a daily basis with enough crises to close down a real hospital, or at least to drive it into bankruptcy. But despite the title, Dream Job deals in large degree with Melanie’s private life, or lack of it, until she meets the owner of an upstate antique shop, and decides not only is he the man for her, but she must take the initiative.
And so in this tale, we shuttle between bucolic life in a rural town and Melanie’s frenetic existence in the hospital’s HR department. Can a big-city girl adjust to peace and quiet, happiness and contentment, or is she hard-wired for urban chaos and melodrama?
Melanie, like the author, is Jewish — she even teaches her rustic boyfriend how to light a hannukiah — but there is little else in this novel about Jewish religion, experience, or peoplehood to consider Dream Job: Wacky Adventures of an HR Manager a “Jewish” book. What can be said about it is that it provides a light-hearted read.
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Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted via donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com