APRIL 2016 - AudioFile
Edoardo Ballerini’s narration finds an appropriately erudite yet youthful tone that draws the listener in. Four friends come to post-9/11 New York after college to stake out their lives, only to face a personal tragedy within their group. The audiobook may speak most clearly to listeners who relate closely to the experiences of these characters: young university graduates navigating the city during the early recession years. The themes, however, are universal. Ballerini provides the right tone for these engaging characters, who are collectively earnest, witty, sarcastic, and thoughtful. S.P.C. © AudioFile 2016, Portland, Maine
Publishers Weekly
01/11/2016
Jansma's compelling paean to New York City features a group of post-college friends who manage the vagaries of love and friendship against the backdrop of living in the big city: opportunity, stress, beauty, as well as the allure of the über rich juxtaposed against the impoverished. The cast includes Irene Richmond, an artist supporting her craft by working at a hip art gallery; George Murphy, an astronomer whose life research may be imploding; his college girlfriend and soon to be wife, Sara Sherman, an editor for a paper; William Cho, working in investments, living with his mother, and harboring a crush on Irene; and Jacob Blaumann, the quintessential graduate not living up to his potential—having made his mark as a poet, but working as an orderly at a mental health facility in the suburbs and having an affair with his boss. Underneath the interactions between the characters lurks an examination of relationships and the ways friendship is tested when one in their midst is beset by a rare form of cancer. Steering clear of the maudlin, the author gives searing portrayals of both challenging cancer treatment and how true friends rise to the occasion when necessary. Jansma (The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards) pens a tightly-written, smartly conceived story that puts an insightful spin on life in the Big Apple. (Feb.)
From the Publisher
Praise for Why We Came to the City
“A tremendous accomplishment: an elegant and deeply moving meditation on friendship and mortality, both fearless and finely wrought. I believe this book will stay with me for a very long time.”
—Emily St. John Mandel, author of Station Eleven
“Stunning . . . A beautiful, sprawling, and generous book. Jansma is a brilliantly talented writer, but he also has a unique insight into what friends mean to one another, and what it means to be part of a city in which you never quite belong, but can’t quite bring yourself to leave. It’s a heartfelt novel, tender and painful and cathartic all at once, and even if the characters belong to New York, the story belongs to us all.”
—Michael Schaub, NPR
“A brilliant stylist, Kristopher Jansma draws readers into an intricate web of lives in the big city in his astonishing new work. He writes with power and passion . . . and inhabits his characters, thinking what they think and feeling what they feel so compellingly that he pulls the reader into the story and won’t let go. . . . A wonderful, unforgettable novel.”
—Miami Herald
“Jansma’s novel is a love letter to Manhattan, the letter so many of us who moved here in our 20s have written. . . . Like the rest of us, his characters learn that things don’t always work out the way we plan, but if we stick with our city, our city delivers.”
—Helen Ellis, The New York Times Book Review
“Enticing . . . Much like a modern Great Gatsby, this book is awash in the feeling of the city.”
—Melissa Ragsdale, Bustle
“Fans of Bret Easton Ellis’s stream-of-consciousness narratives will enjoy Jasma’s paean to New York City.”
—In Style
“Joyful and tragic, Jansma’s book will appeal to readers who loved Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life.”
—Men’s Journal
“As the characters navigate the complexities of an untimely and unexpected tragedy . . . Jansma artfully counters the heaviness of these themes with a delightful, and at times laugh-out-loud hilarious, narrative. Dialogues are smart, absurd, and addictive; and the author’s insights border on the philosophically expansive and profound.”
—Santa Cruz Sentinel
"Like A Little Life and The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P., Jansma's Why We Came to the City shows us, with beauty and insight, what it's like to be young and smart in this time, and in this place. It's a major achievement."
—Darin Strauss, author of Half a Life
“Why did we come to the city, anyway? And why on earth would we ever leave? In Jansma's able hands, these are and are not metaphors. We came because we are more ourselves as part of a collective. We came to learn our limits. We came so that we might know when to leave. This is a lively, addictive party of a book, and you're invited."
—Elisa Albert, author of After Birth
“Fantastic. This beautiful, boisterous novel is a paean to New York, to the hubris of youthful optimism, and, especially, to the powerful magnet of friendship. It’s full of as much heartache and humor as the city itself. And like the city, this story will break you apart in a dozen ways, only to teach you, tenderly, how to put yourself back together. I wanted it never to end, but when I read the last page, I loved it even more. Jansma is a star.”
—Alena Graedon, author of The Word Exchange
“Kristopher Jansma’s dazzling Why We Came to the City is at once a tribute and a breakup letter to New York, timeless as the elegant architectural details that jut ornately from older buildings, yet timely as a phone freighted with an urgent missive. The constellation of relationships he charts feels so vivid and visceral that we not only see it but find ourselves caught, swaying in its gravitational tugs and tilts. In page after page abounding with wit, candor, and compassion, Jansma reveals the indelible nature of our connections and commitments to one another, along with their gossamer fragility.”
—Tim Horvath, author of Understories
“Lively and elegant . . . poised to make Jansma a name you know.”
—Meredith Turits
“A deeply emotional ode to friendship . . . Jansma’s narrative shines.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Jansma’s compelling paean to New York City features a group of post-college friends who manage the vagaries of love and friendship against the backdrop of living in the big city. . . . A tightly written, smartly conceived story that puts an insightful spin on life in the Big Apple.”
—Publishers Weekly
“This hefty novel, with its multiple characters and shifting relationships, is the kind that book clubs will love. . . . Gets at the heart of what it’s like to be young and alive in the big city.”
—Library Journal
Library Journal
02/01/2016
In this sprawling novel by the author of The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards, five twentysomethings come of age in contemporary New York City, realizing, in one character's own words, that they "are not special." But they are special, young people of privilege and Cornell University grads with great jobs: William's in finance; Sara's an editor; her fiancé, George, is an astrophysicist; Irene is an artist; and Jacob is a poet. OK, Jacob is a psychiatric aide since there's no money in poetry, and Irene is a gofer in a gallery, but at least she has benefits. And they all pull together for her when she gets cancer. VERDICT This hefty novel, with its multiple characters and shifting relationships, is the kind that book clubs will love, although character development isn't really its long suit; too often, it relies on cumbersome lists of individuals' quirky behaviors. Perhaps the most refined character is the city itself, evoked throughout in descriptions of side streets, bars, clubs, hotels, and galleries and in three exceptional and beautifully compact chapters, written in Joshua Ferris-esque, first-person plural prose, that get at the heart of what it's like to be young and alive in the big city. [See Prepub Alert, 8/31/15.]—Reba Leiding, emeritus, James Madison Univ. Lib., Harrisonburg, VA
APRIL 2016 - AudioFile
Edoardo Ballerini’s narration finds an appropriately erudite yet youthful tone that draws the listener in. Four friends come to post-9/11 New York after college to stake out their lives, only to face a personal tragedy within their group. The audiobook may speak most clearly to listeners who relate closely to the experiences of these characters: young university graduates navigating the city during the early recession years. The themes, however, are universal. Ballerini provides the right tone for these engaging characters, who are collectively earnest, witty, sarcastic, and thoughtful. S.P.C. © AudioFile 2016, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
2015-12-26
From the author of The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards (2013), a deeply emotional ode to friendship—to the people who make you feel alive and who you follow without question and to the bonds that endure, even if only in memory. "We came to the city because we wished to live haphazardly, to reach for only the least realistic of our desires." Jansma's novel opens with an optimistic buzz as college best friends who moved to New York City five years ago are meeting for an annual holiday party. Fancy champagne is had, an engagement is on the horizon, a new romance is brewing, and one of them, the elusive but caring artist Irene, is avoiding all conversation about the lump she found under her eye. The seriousness of this lump is revealed early on, and the novel quickly becomes less about the intoxicating feelings of possibility the city offers to dynamic groups such as this and more about how tragedy can rip holes in this beautiful illusion. "No one was special" is a realization Irene's friends come to at different points in their story together. It hits Sara, the micromanaging do-gooder, at Duane Reade while buying adult diapers for Irene. It affects George, Sara's fiance, who feels helpless, and William, who has loved Irene from afar for years and must now consider the purpose of his life if she's no longer there. While the story is set specifically in New York during the 2008 recession, and while Jansma seems to want the city to be the binding force that keeps these friends together, it's Irene, and the power of her friendship, that achieves this best. "Irene…is a magnet," George says, and it's true that while the city gave the friends exciting lives, it's friendship that makes them keep on living. "There are cities with just me, and cities with only you…and even one city that we all, each of us, believe in, that never fully leaves us." Perhaps unintentionally, Jansma's emotional tale shows that a city can be encompassed by a person. This story is sad and sometimes overly sentimental, but Jansma's narrative shines when he moves away from the collective experience and focuses on the lasting impact of individual moments.
