Like Meg Wolitzer’s The Interestings, Antalek’s second novel is an engaging ensemble piece with revealing insights about friendships. A great choice for book clubs looking for new adult titles.” — Library Journal
“THE GROWN UPS is a highly relatable, fiercely readable, and deeply satisfying tale about the families we don’t choose, the history that binds us, and the evolving relationships that shape our lives. Antalek writes with a clear eye, a deft touch, and a big heart.” — Jonathan Evison, author of The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving
“Fans of Meg Wolitzer’s The Interestings and Joanna Hershon’s A Dual Inheritance will love this thoughtful exploration of the warp and weft of our closest relationships.” — Amy Shearn, author of The Mermaid of Brooklyn and How Far Is The Ocean from Here
“A celebration of resiliency and the bonds of friendship...Antalek’s unflinching but merciful lens illuminates a tender beauty in life’s ups and downs, in the compassion born of heartache and failure, and in the gratitude owed to those who provide companionship and shelter along the way.” — Susan Henderson, author of Up from the Blue
“In this vast, funny, and often profound novel, Antalek has given us more than just a good read — she’s painted a portrait of how youth evolves into age, and the loss and victory that comes with inevitable, hard-fought adulthood.” — Susanna Daniel, author of Sea Creatures and Stiltsville
“One of those rare books that pulls you deeper into your own life and your own memories...You’ll hang on to this book like a photo album that you’ll want to flip through again and again, if only to feel the poignant ache of nostalgia.” — Jessica Anya Blau, author of The Wonder Bread Summer
Fans of Meg Wolitzer’s The Interestings and Joanna Hershon’s A Dual Inheritance will love this thoughtful exploration of the warp and weft of our closest relationships.
In this vast, funny, and often profound novel, Antalek has given us more than just a good read — she’s painted a portrait of how youth evolves into age, and the loss and victory that comes with inevitable, hard-fought adulthood.
One of those rare books that pulls you deeper into your own life and your own memories...You’ll hang on to this book like a photo album that you’ll want to flip through again and again, if only to feel the poignant ache of nostalgia.
THE GROWN UPS is a highly relatable, fiercely readable, and deeply satisfying tale about the families we don’t choose, the history that binds us, and the evolving relationships that shape our lives. Antalek writes with a clear eye, a deft touch, and a big heart.
A celebration of resiliency and the bonds of friendship...Antalek’s unflinching but merciful lens illuminates a tender beauty in life’s ups and downs, in the compassion born of heartache and failure, and in the gratitude owed to those who provide companionship and shelter along the way.
12/01/2014
For teenagers Sam Turner, Suzie Epstein, and Bella Spade, life in a New York suburb is a jumble of friendships and young crushes, complicated but retaining some innocence. This insulated world collapses in the aftermath of family break ups and the path to becoming grown-ups is suddenly more complex. Over the next decade, Suzie and Bella barrel through college and into relationships. Sam drifts about switching jobs, and they all reshape their ties to aging parents. Despite stumbles and losses, each finds a way to adulthood, sometimes aided and sometimes held back by their childhood bonds. VERDICT Like Meg Wolitzer's The Interestings, Antalek's second novel (after The Summer We Fell Apart) is an engaging ensemble piece with revealing insights about friendships. A great choice for book clubs looking for new adult titles.—Jan Blodgett, Davidson Coll. Lib., NC
2014-12-21
Over a period of 15 years, a group of affluent teenagers grows up amid parental crises and misfortunes of their own making. In the summer of 1997 in Rye, New York, 15-year-old Sam looks through the box Suzie Epstein hands him. In it are photos, taken by Suzie's father, of all the mothers of the neighborhood, smiling, in swimsuits, perhaps conquests of Mr. Epstein, perhaps not. It's the summer of unraveling: The Epsteins, after public confrontations, move to suburban Boston to start anew, and Sam's mother simply leaves, abandoning Sam and his father to companionable bachelorhood. Despite their first-love-fueled fumblings, Sam and Suzie lose touch. Suzie, reeling from caring for her younger brothers once her father permanently decamps and her mother befriends a vodka bottle, cuts all ties with her humiliating past, hoping to escape to college early. Sam takes up with Suzie's best friend, Bella, a relationship that continues through college in an undefined, convenient pattern of long weekends and longer separations. When Bella's mother dies, they all return to Rye, to the pot fugue of Peter Chang's basement, and even Suzie returns, shockingly on the arm of Sam's older, medical-student brother. Sam is unstrung by Suzie and his brother's relationship, and, coupled with a failing GPA, this ushers in a decade of drifting for Sam, a disappointment to everyone, including Bella, who later sacrifices everything for a demanding poet. Antalek's narrative, split among Sam, Suzie and Bella, is disconnected from time and place (they are millennials though could be from any of the past four decades, there are so few details) so the focus rests entirely on their opaque emotional struggles, leaving neither plot not character to drive the story. The plot, like the protagonists themselves, wanders to adulthood in this middling coming-of-age tale.
