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Summary
Summary
A warm, funny and acutely perceptive debut novel about four adult siblings and the fate of the shared inheritance that has shaped their choices and their lives.
Every family has its problems. But even among the most troubled, the Plumb family stands out as spectacularly dysfunctional. Years of simmering tensions finally reach a breaking point on an unseasonably cold afternoon in New York City as Melody, Beatrice, and Jack Plumb gather to confront their charismatic and reckless older brother, Leo, freshly released from rehab. Months earlier, an inebriated Leo got behind the wheel of a car with a nineteen-year-old waitress as his passenger. The ensuing accident has endangered the Plumbs' joint trust fund, The Nest, which they are months away from finally receiving. Meant by their deceased father to be a modest mid-life supplement, the Plumb siblings have watched The Nest s value soar along with the stock market and have been counting on the money to solve a number of self-inflicted problems.
Melody, a wife and mother in an upscale suburb, has an unwieldy mortgage and looming college tuition for her twin teenage daughters. Jack, an antiques dealer, has secretly borrowed against the beach cottage he shares with his husband, Walker, to keep his store open. And Bea, a once-promising short-story writer, just can t seem to finish her overdue novel. Can Leo rescue his siblings and, by extension, the people they love? Or will everyone need to reimagine the futures they ve envisioned? Brought together as never before, Leo, Melody, Jack, and Beatrice must grapple with old resentments, present-day truths, and the significant emotional and financial toll of the accident, as well as finally acknowledge the choices they have made in their own lives.
This is a story about the power of family, the possibilities of friendship, the ways we depend upon one another and the ways we let one another down. In this tender, entertaining, and deftly written debut, Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney brings a remarkable cast of characters to life to illuminate what money does to relationships, what happens to our ambitions over the course of time, and the fraught yet unbreakable ties we share with those we love."
Reviews (7)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Sweeney's entertaining saga of the financial and emotional ups and downs of one privileged New York family is performed well by Barron, a stage and television actress with many guest appearances to her credit. All four of the main characters-middle-aged siblings Leo, Jack, Bea, and Melody-are treated with sympathy, even as their joint fixation on their jeopardized family inheritance renders them unsympathetic. Using pitch-perfect comic timing, Barron thrives with Sweeney's droll observations, bringing the novel's wit to life. She also excels at a particular kind of "mean-girl" voice that is employed for several minor characters, from Melody's status-obsessed cohorts in the suburbs to Bea's fellow "Glitterary Girls" (former up-and-coming writers like Bea). Barron is less successful anytime a character requires a foreign accent, which is especially noticeable in the on-again/off-again British cadence she gives Leo's former business partner. Overall, however, this is an enjoyable audiobook performance. An Ecco hardcover. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* The four adult Plumb siblings suave Jack, artsy Bea, playboy Leo, and meek Melody have been waiting until Melody's fortieth birthday, when they are supposed to receive their inheritance. The nest egg that the dysfunctional siblings are all counting on disappears, however, when an inebriated Leo gets in a major car accident with an underage waitress, and their estranged mother empties the fund to pay off the damages. Leo makes a vague promise to return the money, so they give him three months to figure something out. Jack needs the money to shore up his antique dealership and prevent his partner from discovering he's about to lose their summer home; Bea, a once-rising literary star (part of a group dubbed the Glitterary Girls in the late 90s), could use the funds to take time off and complete her still-unfinished novel; and Melody, a sweet suburban housewife, worries about paying for her twin daughters' college education. Leo himself was counting on the cash to buy his way back into the New York publishing world after a bitter divorce left him broke. D'Aprix gives each of the characters a distinct and true personality, and she has a flair for realistic and funny dialogue readers will feel as though they're sitting right next to the clan as they bicker and barter. Fans of Jonathan Tropper will adore D'Aprix's debut.--Vnuk, Rebecca Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
A RAGE FOR ORDER: The Middle East in Turmoil, From Tahrir Square to ISIS, by Robert F. Worth. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $15.) A masterly account of the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings, and the region's decline into violence and anarchy, by a former New York Times foreign correspondent. Our reviewer, Kenneth M. Pollack, called the book "a marvel of storytelling, with the chapters conjuring a poignancy fitting for the subject." THE MIRROR THIEF, by Martin Seay. (Melville House, $17.99.) Linked narratives brimming with delightful, esoteric detail unfold in three Venices: 16thcentury Italy; 1950s Venice Beach, Calif. ; and the Venetian casino in Las Vegas in 2003. A card counter, the man hired to track him down and an oblique book of poems weave through a series of schemes in this novel, with a structure that recalls David Mitchell's "Cloud Atlas." FREE SPEECH: Ten Principles for a Connected World, by Timothy Garton Ash. (Yale University, $22.) Protected speech is under siege on a wide front and is caught up in a number of modern controversies, from the role of government surveillance to the criminalization of hate speech and the prosecution of whistle-blowers. Garton Ash examines 10 such cases, framed with his call for "more free speech but also better speech." THE NEST, by Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney. (Ecco/ HarperCollins, $16.99.) A $2 million trust fund is set aside for the Plumb siblings, who are each counting on their share to rescue them from financial straits. But months before they are set to receive the money, Leo, the eldest, squanders a majority of the sum after a car accident; the ensuing family drama of "firstworld problems proves to be an enjoyable comedy of manners as Sweeney artfully skewers family dynamics," our reviewer, Patricia Park, wrote. LAROSE, by Louise Erdrich. (Harper Perennial, $15.99.) While hunting buck, Landreaux does the worst thing imaginable: He accidentally kills his best friend's child. As penance, he offers his own son, LaRose, to the grieving parents, setting in motion a powerful story of ancestry, justice and forgiveness. JOE GOULD'S TEETH, by Jill Lepore. (Vintage, $16.) Gould - a New York eccentric friendly with many of the early 20th century's bestknown artists - decided to record everything anyone said to him, aiming to "widen the sphere of history as Walt Whitman did that of poetry." The project, known as "The Oral History of Our Time," acquired a near-mythic status - and then some wondered if it ever existed at all. Lepore, a New Yorker staff writer and Harvard historian, sets out to discover the manuscript's fate.
School Library Journal Review
The four Plumb siblings are waiting for their inheritance (affectionately called the nest) to be dispersed once the youngest sister turns 40. The nest has been growing exponentially since their father's untimely death when they were all adolescents, and each one of the Plumbs has been making poor financial decisions in the hopes of being bailed out by the nest. Instead, the oldest brother is allowed to withdraw the majority of the money early to be used as a payoff for an unfortunate accident he causes. The story develops as the remaining siblings begin to navigate life and the consequences of their decisions without a safety net, but the plot is much more complex than a look at four dysfunctional and often selfish siblings. Teens will initially be pulled into the story by the shocking events in the prologue, but they will connect with the siblings as they recognize aspects of themselves in each of them. The epilogue goes beyond a typical happy ending, illustrating how the siblings have changed and learned more about themselves. YA readers will enjoy immersing themselves in the trendy side of life in New York, as well as coming to understand how adult life may not be all it seems on a well-crafted surface. VERDICT A strong choice for demonstrating how adulthood is as much of a discovering process as adolescence. Purchase where coming-of-age tales are needed.-April Sanders, Spring Hill College, Mobile, AL © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Guardian Review
Like a big glass of house white at happy hour, Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney's debut novel goes down terribly easily. The problem with cut-price chardonnay, though, is that it tends to give you a touch of acid reflux. This tidily plotted and relentlessly entertaining tale follows four squabbling siblings surnamed Plumb. The plum in the phrase "a plum job" comes from 17th-century slang for [pound]1,000; these four are awaiting a much bigger fortune, the eponymous nest of their inheritance, to be delivered when Melody, the youngest, turns 40. Insights, when they come, are spelled out clearly. Walker, husband to Jack (described as "[Leo]-lite") is lumbered with what we might call -- with apologies to Tolstoy -- " Anna Karenina-principle-lite". Here is Tolstoy 's truism: "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Walker, an attorney who excels at mediation, offers a take on unhappy families that seems the stuff of a thousand TV shows, all, in other words, utterly alike: "Families were the hardest, he knew, but he also knew how to try to bring adults past their own wounds and help them find their way, if not to affection at least to accommodation." This debut about siblings squabbling over an inheritance is almost tyrannically entertaining Like a big glass of house white at happy hour, Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney's debut novel goes down terribly easily. The problem with cut-price chardonnay, though, is that it tends to give you a touch of acid reflux. This tidily plotted and relentlessly entertaining tale follows four squabbling siblings surnamed Plumb. The plum in the phrase "a plum job" comes from 17th-century slang for [pound]1,000; these four are awaiting a much bigger fortune, the eponymous nest of their inheritance, to be delivered when Melody, the youngest, turns 40. We learn that after their father's death the fund has been inflated by the bull market of the noughties "to numbers beyond their wildest dreams". And as the money has grown, so too has their capacity to do the one thing their father warned them against: "count the chickens before they hatched". Most irresponsible is Leo, the oldest, whom we meet in a widescreen, popcorn-crunching prologue. Well-oiled with booze and thoroughly amped on cocaine, he abandons his wife at a society wedding to seduce a teenage waitress; he packs her into his car and speeds off, then with his hands on the wheel and her hands somewhere else, he closes his eyes for a second and crashes. The calamity that ensues is an expensive one. The precious nest is broached. When the other three siblings meet him for lunch to discuss this, they "unconsciously arranged themselves around the red-checkered tablecloth according to birth order: Leo, Jack, Bea, Melody", which, like much of this novel, is both pleasing and egregiously expedient. There is Melody, a downtrodden suburban wife and helicopter parent to twin teenage girls whom she tracks on an app nicknamed "Stalkerville"; Bea, a once-feted writer who is now struggling to finish her long-overdue novel; and Jack, an antiques dealer who, without his husband knowing, has taken out a hefty line of credit on their retirement cottage. Like characters in a Nancy Meyers orRichard Curtis film, they are vivid, animated and ultimately anodyne. Their grins are wry, their laughs are self-deprecating and their every other action seems perfectly matched to the conventions of people in books and movies. There is a similar predictability in the choice of settings, which constitute a kind of sightseeing tour of New York City: here is Central Park looking lovely in the snow; next the Oyster Bar at Grand Central Station; now let's take a turn around the Museum of Natural History. The book feels like tourism in another way, too. In being almost tyrannically entertaining, nothing can ever really matter that much. Reading feels like day tripping -- living shallow in these lives which, for all their drama, never sharpen out of slightly suffocating cosiness. In this way, the Plumbs' various money issues can just feel, well, a little cheap. Insights, when they come, are spelled out clearly. Walker, husband to Jack (described as "Leo-lite") is lumbered with what we might call -- with apologies to Tolstoy -- " Anna Karenina-principle-lite". Here is Tolstoy 's truism: "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Walker, an attorney who excels at mediation, offers a take on unhappy families that seems the stuff of a thousand TV shows, all, in other words, utterly alike: "Families were the hardest, he knew, but he also knew how to try to bring adults past their own wounds and help them find their way, if not to affection at least to accommodation." His plan for their salvation entails a strange mix of aspirational dining with vague touchy-feeliness: "A bit of bubbly, a gorgeous chicken scaloppini, the coconut cake he remembered Melody saying she liked once. Then a gentle discussion about kindness. Accommodation. A different and sturdier kind of nest." In case that wasn't clear: it's family that matters, not money! That's the big, obvious, unassailable truth that the book delivers. To be fair, it does so with charm and proficiency, wrapping up its every plot line into a happy ending worthy of a well focus-grouped blockbuster. By the time of the sweet and sentimental epilogue you can practically hear the woh-oh-ohs of the indie pop song that is about to burst over the end credits. * To order The Nest for [pound]10.39 (RRP [pound]12.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over [pound]10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of [pound]1.99. - Hermione Hoby.
Kirkus Review
Dysfunctional siblings in New York wig out when the eldest blows their shared inheritance. In an arresting prologue to this generous, absorbing novel, Leo Plumb leaves his cousin's wedding early, drunk and high, with one of the waitresses and has a car accident whose exact consequences are withheld for quite some time. To make his troubles go away, Leo pillages a $2 million account known as "The Nest," left by his father for the four children to share after the youngest of them turns 40, though in a sweet running joke, everyone keeps forgetting exactly when that is. Leo's siblings have been counting heavily on this money to resolve their financial troubles and are horrified to learn that their mother has let Leo burn almost all of it. A meeting is called at Grand Central Oyster Barone of many sharply observed New York settingsto discuss Leo's plans to pay them back. Will Leo even show? Three days out of rehab, he barely makes it through Central Park. But he does appear and promises to make good, and despite his history of unreliability, the others remain enough under the spell of their charismatic brother to fall for it. The rest of the book is a wise, affectionate study of how expectations play out in our livesnot just financial ones, but those that control our closest relationships. Sweeney's endearing characters are quirky New Yorkers all: Bea Plumb is a widowed writer who tanked after three stories that made her briefly one of "New York's Newest Voices: Who You Should Be Reading." Jack Plumb, known as "Leo Lite" in high school to his vast irritation, is a gay antiques dealer married to a lawyer; truly desperate for cash, he becomes involved in a shady deal involving a work of art stolen from the ruins of the World Trade Center. Melody, the youngest, lives in the suburbs in a house she's about to lose and is obsessed with tracking her teenage twins using an app called Stalkerville. The insouciance with which they thwart her is another metaphor for the theme of this lively novel. A fetching debut from an author who knows her city, its people, and their hearts. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
This anticipated debut novel from Sweeney typifies the Internet meme "white people problems" even more than most current New York City-based literary fiction. It concerns the Plumb siblings, four middle-class New Yorkers, and their upcoming inheritance. The Plumb patriarch set aside a sum to become available to the four of them when the youngest, Melody, turned 40, in order to teach them a lesson about independence. The story opens with Leo Plumb high on cocaine and getting into a car wreck as he seduces a 19-year-old waitress, a scandal that puts the now hefty inheritance at risk. The story moves along briskly, shifting perspectives between the Plumbs and those associated with them. There is Melody, the youngest, and her teenage daughter's sexual awakening; Jack, an antique dealer, and his secret husband; Leo and publisher girlfriend Stephanie, who owns a brownstone in Brooklyn and rents the lower floor to a man who lost his wife in 9/11; and finally, Bea, the failed novelist. These stories are seamlessly combined as predictable tragedies and triumphs befall everyone. VERDICT Anyone with siblings will appreciate the character dynamics at play here, although they may not care much for each character individually. A fun, quick read recommended for fans of Emma Straub and Meg Wolitzer. [See Prepub Alert, 9/28/15.]-Kate Gray, Boston P.L., MA © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.