- Date Read: May 30, 2022
- Publication Date: May 31, 2022
- Rating: 2.0 / 5.0
- Format: Audio Book
- Page Count: 448
- Listening Time: 16 hours 19 minutes
- Print Publisher: Celadon Books
- Audio Publisher: Macmillan Audio
My goodness, this book was a commitment. I adore literary fiction, especially deep family stories, and I choose character over plot any day. That said, this book was dense and hard to get through, and the characters were challenging to form a bond with.
In this book we meet the Oppenheimer family, a wealthy Jewish American family living in New York City. We see the parents’ relationship as well as their lives outside their relationship, and we follow their children through childhood into adulthood. There’s not a strong familial bond in any direction for majority of the book and it’s essentially a collection of individual experiences.
The development is intentionally slow and if I am looking neutrally at the writing, it’s effective. My challenge as a reader was that each character in the first 80% of the book was going out of their way to be unlikeable. They’re cruel at times and it’s clear they know there will be no serious consequences. By the end, as more characters are given the floor and the initial characters evolve, I was too lost on everyone to feel a redemption arc.
The last 15-20% of the book was offbeat. The pace accelerated, attempts at personal growth were too packaged, the “twists” were sad and out of place, and it was disarming compared to the extremely slow pace in the beginning.
The topics that the book tried to tackle were all big – grief, infidelity, infertility, generational trauma, racism, privilege, religion, LGBTQ+ identity. I love and intentionally seek out books that illuminate these experiences, but ultimately it was not great to see them through the lives of the Oppenheimers.
For me, this wasn’t it. I didn’t have an issue with the slow pace or book length, and it wasn’t just that the characters were unlikeable and unapologetic. The Paper Palace had both of those elements and I really enjoyed that book. Ultimately, it was the combination of topics this book addresses being told through these characters.
Content warnings: Infertility, Death of parent, LGBTQ+ Outing, Racism, Religious bigotry, Infidelity, Abandonment
Thank you to Macmillan Audio and NetGalley for providing this book in exchange for my review.
