What a wave Debra Galant is riding.

The Glen Ridge mom is the co-founder of one of the country’s top hyper-local blogathons, www.baristanet.com. And her scathingly funny book called Rattled (www.debragalant.com) that takes aim at life in the New Jersey exurbs has just been released in paperback.

Montclair and Glen Ridge residents know all about Baristanet, because the website has its sights on just about every aspect of life in the suburban-urban, over-taxed, media-centric hyper-competitive towns.

The Baristas examine the mundane aggravations: curbs with metal rods that damage residents’ tires. They investigate the cause of purple bird droppings (was it the mulberry bush?) and lead the assault on a new housing development because its sanitary nature is so out of character with Montclair’s charming, eclectic housing stock.

Debate is encouraged, sometimes pitting neighbor against neighbor.

Rattled is set in a brand new Burlington County development called Galapagos Estates. The Peters family has just moved into their dream McMansion.

Pushy heroine Heather Peters, weaponized with cell phone and PDA, battles the inequities of bad movers and builders and bureaucratic school systems.

Then her handyman slays a threatening timber rattlesnake, and Heather is tossed in jail (her arrest during back-to-school night is LOL funny) for killing an endangered species.

Turns out, the whole place is a snake pit. Environmentalists and the media descend. The result is a painfully funny ex-urban version of Bonfire of the Vanities.

Debra, formerly the New Jersey columnist for The New York Times, was inspired by a snake-related arrest she reported on in South Jersey.

The brand new fictional sub-division is a long way from the established leafiness of Montclair and Glen Ridge. But the mischievous Debra is stirring things up in truth and fiction. Maybe her two worlds are not as far apart as we think?