Hoover is one of the freshest voices in new-adult fiction, and her latest resonates with true emotion, unforgettable characters and just the right amount of sexual tension. But Ridge can’t hide his feelings for Sydney long-and they face their dilemma with refreshing emotional honesty. Independent Maggie never complains about Ridge’s friendship with Sydney, and it's hard to even want Ridge to leave Maggie when she reveals her devastating secret. But Ridge’s lingering feelings for Maggie cause heartache for all three of them. Peterson’s eight original songs flesh out Sydney’s lyrics with a good mix of moody musical styles: “Living a Lie” has the drama of a Coldplay piano ballad, while the chorus of “Maybe Someday” marches to the rhythm of the Lumineers. In fact, it creates opportunities for sexy nonverbal communication and witty text messages: Ridge tenderly washes off a message he wrote on Sydney’s hand in ink, and when Sydney adds a few too many e’s to the word “squee” in her text, Ridge replies, “If those letters really make up a sound, I am so, so glad I can’t hear it.” While they fight their mutual attraction, their hope that “maybe someday” they can be together playfully comes out in their music. Ridge’s deafness doesn’t impede their relationship or their music. She finds out after the fact that Ridge already has a long-distance girlfriend, Maggie-and that he's deaf. The two begin a songwriting partnership that grows into something more once Sydney dumps Hunter and decides to crash with Ridge and his two roommates while she gets back on her feet. While music student Sydney is watching her neighbor Ridge play guitar on his balcony across the courtyard, Ridge is watching Sydney’s boyfriend, Hunter, secretly make out with her best friend on her balcony. Hoover is a master at writing scenes from dual perspectives. Sydney and Ridge make beautiful music together in a love triangle written by Hoover ( Losing Hope, 2013, etc.), with a link to a digital soundtrack by American Idol contestant Griffin Peterson. But halfway through, at a mommy group in Fresno, the novel takes a turn, going from cool to coolly wrenching, as Popkey layers something like tenderness.Ī rich and rigorous dissection of how we construct who we are. Two years after that, in Los Angeles, divorced, the narrator is armed with another story to explain her behavior to herself: “that I have been, that I continue to be, best at being a vessel for the desire of others.” The first sections of the novel are incisive, often biting, but mannered, as though the narrator’s own oppressive self-consciousness has rubbed off on the prose. This is the underlying premise of their relationship, that they are both bad people or at least, that is the story they tell themselves and so the story that unites them. Ten years later, at an art exhibit in San Francisco-the work is by a Swedish video artist whose subject is “female pain”-our narrator and a friend discuss heartbreak with detached cruelty. This is the question that propels the novel it is a book of ideas-about power and gender, about desire, about loneliness and rage-but it is also, at its core, a novel about storytelling, about the quest for a stable narrative that can explain us to others and to ourselves. Had not yet realized the folly of governing narratives,” she recalls. “I, at twenty-one, did not, had not yet settled on the governing narrative of my life. But what captivates our narrator is the woman’s certainty, her belief in her own story. One night, the mother, an Argentinian psychoanalyst, recounts her own romantic history, a lesson in the gendered dynamics of power. Our narrator, a grad student in English, is spending August on vacation with a more glamorous friend’s family, earning her keep minding their 7-year-old twins. An unnamed narrator navigates female identity-her own and in general-through a series of conversations that span the course of 20 years in Popkey’s painfully sharp debut.
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