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Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

July 21st, 2024/0 Comments

Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

I loved this novel for its sharp, whip-smart observations and turns of phrase. I love a book with funny, revelatory descriptions and this one delivers. It is a simple plot that is basically an excuse to delve into the theme of generational inheritance and trauma. The Fletcher family is scarred by their father’s kidnapping, their inherited wealth, as well as the toxicity of the family business – a styrofoam factory. The character development is thorough with each sibling getting a good chunk of ink, allowing for the nuclear family described from various angles and points in time. We also see the family characters as they bump up against the outside world – employers, spouses, love interests, friends, and employees. These scenes offer comedic dialogue, examples of paranoia, neurosis, and guilt – scenes which the author has great skill in painting to the extent they could be laugh out loud funny and cringe-worthy at the same time. The reader deduces from the opening pages that this is a doomed family, the novel portraying their fall from grace, nevertheless there is so much intelligent language and observation to be soaked up from every page. Highly recommend.

About Long Island Compromise:

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • An exhilarating novel about one American family, the dark moment that shatters their suburban paradise, and the wild legacy of trauma and inheritance, from the New York Times bestselling author of Fleishman Is in Trouble

New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice • New York Magazine’s Beach Read Book Club Pick • Belletrist Book Club Pick

“A big, juicy, wickedly funny social satire . . . probably the funniest book ever about generational family trauma.”—Oprah Daily

“Were we gangsters? No. But did we know how to start a fire?”

In 1980, a wealthy businessman named Carl Fletcher is kidnapped from his driveway, brutalized, and held for ransom. He is returned to his wife and kids less than a week later, only slightly the worse, and the family moves on with their lives, resuming their prized places in the saga of the American dream, comforted in the realization that though their money may have been what endangered them, it is also what assured them their safety.

But now, nearly forty years later, it’s clear that perhaps nobody ever got over anything, after all. Carl has spent the ensuing years secretly seeking closure to the matter of his kidnapping, while his wife, Ruth, has spent her potential protecting her husband’s emotional health. Their three grown children aren’t doing much better: Nathan’s chronic fear won’t allow him to advance at his law firm; Beamer, a Hollywood screenwriter, will consume anything—substance, foodstuff, women—in order to numb his own perpetual terror; and Jenny has spent her life so bent on proving that she’s not a product of her family’s pathology that she has come to define it. As they hover at the delicate precipice of a different kind of survival, they learn that the family fortune has dwindled to just about nothing, and they must face desperate questions about how much their wealth has played a part in both their lives’ successes and failures.

Long Island Compromise spans the entirety of one family’s history, winding through decades and generations, all the way to the outrageous present, and confronting the mainstays of American Jewish life: tradition, the pursuit of success, the terror of history, fear of the future, old wives’ tales, evil eyes, ambition, achievement, boredom, dybbuks, inheritance, pyramid schemes, right-wing capitalists, beta-blockers, psychics, and the mostly unspoken love and shared experience that unite a family forever.

Read more of Jeannie’s Reviews on her blog, on Goodreads or StoryGraph, or on the New York Journal of Books. For more TBR inspiration, check out Jeannie’s curated book lists at Bookshop.org.

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Leaving by Roxana Robinson

June 27th, 2024/0 Comments

Leaving by Roxana Robinson

** spoiler alert ** So many people I admire gushed over this book and so I began this book with high hopes. It certainly has good qualities, the language and the voice are strong. This is the story of a couple who had been together in college finding each other again after thirty or forty years and the man, Warren, leaves his wife to be with the woman, Sarah. Their relationship becomes a long, painful, dead-end street. That aside, I couldn’t reconcile Sarah’s character – she was attracted to Warren and pleased he was pursuing her, but never seemed willing to totally commit to moving somewhere to be with him or to share her home with him. She was rigid and and unwilling to compromise and yet when Warren breaks it off it’s like her world has come to an end. Her thoughts and reactions were misaligned. In addition, the author could be repetitive, harping on for pages and pages. There is a good bit of the book dedicated to the main characters’ relationships with their children, the through lines of which got lost for me. I wont be one of those reviewers who complains about not liking the characters, but there were three in this book I just couldn’t listen to any longer.

About Leaving:

What risks would you be willing to take to fall in love again?

“I never thought I’d see you here,” Sarah says. Then she adds, “But I never thought I’d see you anywhere.” Sarah and Warren’s college love story ended in a single moment.

Decades later, when a chance meeting brings them together, a passion ignites―threatening the foundations of the lives they’ve built apart. Since they parted in college, each has married, raised a family, and made a career. When they meet again, Sarah is divorced and living outside New York, while Warren is still married and living in Boston.

Seeing Warren sparks an awakening in Sarah, who feels emotionally alive for the first time in decades. Still, she hesitates to reclaim a chance at love after her painful divorce and years of framing her life around her children and her work. Warren has no such reservations: he wants to leave his marriage but can’t predict how his wife and daughter will react.

As their affair intensifies, Sarah and Warren must confront the moral responsibilities of their love for their families and each other. Leaving charts a passage through loyalty and desire as it builds to a shattering conclusion.

In her boldest and most powerful work to date, Roxana Robinson demonstrates her “trademark gifts as an intelligent, sensitive analyst of family life” (Wendy Smith, Chicago Tribune ) in an engrossing exploration of the vows we make to one another, the tensile relationships between parents and their children, and what we owe to others and ourselves.

Read more of Jeannie’s Reviews on her blog, on Goodreads or StoryGraph, or on the New York Journal of Books. For more TBR inspiration, check out Jeannie’s curated book lists at Bookshop.org.

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James by Percival Everett

April 17th, 2024/0 Comments

James by Percival Everett

In this retelling of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Percival Everett gives us enslaved Jim’s point of view. This book epitomizes why retellings of classic literature are necessary – we may know the original was racist in its orientation but to read James is to feel it in your bones. It is a tragic, and haunting novel that is, at the same time, very easy to read – most likely because the foundational text is ingrained in us and we expect where the story is headed. What a gift to the cannon.

About James:

A brilliant, action-packed reimagining of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn , both harrowing and ferociously funny, told from the enslaved Jim’s point of view.

When the enslaved Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he decides to hide on nearby Jackson Island until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck Finn has faked his own death to escape his violent father, recently returned to town. As all readers of American literature know, thus begins the dangerous and transcendent journey by raft down the Mississippi River toward the elusive and too-often-unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond.

While many narrative set pieces of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn remain in place (floods and storms, stumbling across both unexpected death and unexpected treasure in the myriad stopping points along the river’s banks, encountering the scam artists posing as the Duke and Dauphin…), Jim’s agency, intelligence and compassion are shown in a radically new light.

Read more of Jeannie’s Reviews on her blog, on Goodreads or StoryGraph, or on the New York Journal of Books. For more TBR inspiration, check out Jeannie’s curated book lists at Bookshop.org.

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Day by Michael Cunningham

March 25th, 2024/0 Comments

Day by Michael Cunningham

This novel is wonderful for its in-depth character portrayals. Cunningham takes very authentic and simple domestic situations and makes them the subject of this beautifully paced work. A generation of young parents and their inquisitive children, the devotion of a brother and sister, an infatuation between brothers-in-law, all the struggles of childcare and childraising stress relationships…. and then there is COVID. The effect of the pandemic on a marriage, on the family members’ psyches and the aftermath of one of their deaths is written with tenderness and insight. This is a fabulous read depicting the new age in which we live.

About Day:

As the world changes around them, a family weathers the storms of growing up, growing older, falling in and out of love, losing the things that are most precious—and learning to go on—from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Hours

April 5, 2019 : In a cozy brownstone in Brooklyn, the veneer of domestic bliss is beginning to crack. Dan and Isabel, troubled husband and wife, are both a little bit in love with Isabel’s younger brother, Robbie. Robbie, wayward soul of the family, who still lives in the attic loft; Robbie, who, trying to get over his most recent boyfriend, has created a glamorous avatar online; Robbie, who now has to move out of the house—and whose departure threatens to break the family apart. Meanwhile Nathan, age ten, is taking his first uncertain steps toward independence, while Violet, five, does her best not to notice the growing rift between her parents.

April 5, 2020: As the world goes into lockdown, the brownstone is feeling more like a prison. Violet is terrified of leaving the windows open, obsessed with keeping her family safe, while Nathan attempts to skirt her rules. Isabel and Dan communicate mostly in veiled jabs and frustrated sighs. And beloved Robbie is stranded in Iceland, alone in a mountain cabin with nothing but his thoughts—and his secret Instagram life—for company.

April 5, 2021: Emerging from the worst of the crisis, the family reckons with a new, very different reality—with what they’ve learned, what they’ve lost, and how they might go on.

From the brilliant mind of Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Cunningham, Day is a searing, exquisitely crafted meditation on love and loss and the struggles and limitations of family life—how to live together and apart.

Read more of Jeannie’s Reviews on her blog, on Goodreads or StoryGraph, or on the New York Journal of Books. For more TBR inspiration, check out Jeannie’s curated book lists at Bookshop.org.

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Little Monsters by Adrienne Brodeur

February 4th, 2024/0 Comments

Little Monsters by Adrienne Brodeur

In Little Monsters, as in her memoir Wild Game, I loved Brodeur’s writing, especially the descriptions of Cape Cod. The portrayal of setting was my favorite thing about this book. My second favorite book was Adam’s character. He is bipolar and for most of the novel in a manic state. His interiority was masterful and I so appreciated that point of view character. My least favorite thing about the novel is the way it ends. It seems very unresolved with regard to some major plot points. Even so, a very worthwhile read, particularly for lovers of the Cape.

About Little Monsters:

From the author of the bestselling memoir Wild Game comes a riveting novel about Cape Cod, complicated families, and long-buried secrets.

Ken and Abby Gardner lost their mother when they were small and they have been haunted by her absence ever since. Their father, Adam, a brilliant oceanographer, raised them mostly on his own in his remote home on Cape Cod, where the attachment between Ken and Abby deepened into something complicated–and as adults their relationship is strained. Now, years later, the siblings’ lives are still deeply entwined. Ken is a successful businessman with political ambitions and a picture-perfect family and Abby is a talented visual artist who depends on her brother’s goodwill, in part because he owns the studio where she lives and works.

As the novel opens, Adam is approaching his seventieth birthday, staring down his mortality and fading relevance. He has always managed his bipolar disorder with medication, but he’s determined to make one last scientific breakthrough and so he has secretly stopped taking his pills, which he knows will infuriate his children. Meanwhile, Abby and Ken are both harboring secrets of their own, and there is a new person on the periphery of the family—Steph, who doesn’t make her connection known. As Adam grows more attuned to the frequencies of the deep sea and less so to the people around him, Ken and Abby each plan the elaborate gifts they will present to their father on his birthday, jostling for primacy in this small family unit.

Set in the fraught summer of 2016, Little Monsters is a “smart, page-flipping novel…[with] shades of Succession” (The Boston Globe) from a writer who knows Cape Cod inside and out–its Edenic lushness and its snakes.

Read more of Jeannie’s Reviews on her blog, on Goodreads or StoryGraph, or on the New York Journal of Books. For more TBR inspiration, check out Jeannie’s curated book lists at Bookshop.org.

Wellness by Nathan Hill

November 7th, 2023/0 Comments

Wellness by Nathan Hill

I loved The Nix and when I heard Nathan Hill had a new novel coming out, I preordered. I toggled between reading and listening to the audiobook because it is narrated by Ari Fliakos who is my all time favorite reader. His tone captures the wry wit of Hill’s characters so well. But onto Wellness—All I can say is that I have been recommending it to everyone and Nathan Hill has become my favorite author. He writes with the wisdom and life knowledge of a person much older but with the funny, dry cutting language of a person who is younger. His observations about diets and tech to name just two societal staples are hysterical. And yet while being funny and amusing, the book is also so heartbreakingly poignant. I loved it, couldn’t put it down and now while my husband is reading, I am constantly asking him what part he is up to and to read it aloud to me so we can have a good laugh. The best kind of book.

About Wellness:

The New York Times best-selling author of The Nix is back with a poignant and witty novel about a modern marriage and the bonds that keep people together. Mining the absurdities of contemporary society, Wellness reimagines the love story with a healthy dose of insight, irony, and heart.

“A stunning novel about the stories that we tell about our lives and our loves, and how we sustain relationships throughout time—it’s beyond remarkable, both funny and heartbreaking, sometimes on the same page.” —NPR

When Jack and Elizabeth meet as college students in the gritty ’90s Chicago art scene, the two quickly join forces and hold on tight, each eager to claim a place in the thriving underground scene with an appreciative kindred spirit. Fast-forward twenty years to suburban married life, and alongside the challenges of parenting, they encounter the often-baffling pursuits of health and happiness from polyamorous would-be suitors to home-renovation hysteria.

For the first time, Jack and Elizabeth struggle to recognize each other, and the no-longer-youthful dreamers are forced to face their demons, from unfulfilled career ambitions to childhood memories of their own dysfunctional families. In the process, Jack and Elizabeth must undertake separate, personal excavations, or risk losing the best thing in their lives: each other.

Read more of Jeannie’s Reviews on her blog, on Goodreads or StoryGraph, or on the New York Journal of Books. For more TBR inspiration, check out Jeannie’s curated book lists at Bookshop.org.