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3.63 AVERAGE
3.63 AVERAGE
emotional
funny
hopeful
sad
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
emotional
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Novey packs a ton into a slim book. The Jane chapters were much more engaging, and she was a more singular character as an older woman committing herself to art and feeling. Parts of the book made me uncomfortable or left me questioning, mostly in a good way.
This took me a long time to get through. I stopped several times, and picked up other books. I had a hard time connecting to the two women in the story: Leah, the stepdaughter, and Jean, the artist living in rural West Virginia.
It is not a bad book, but I wasn't engaged with the characters or the story and I couldn't find the "point."
Thank you NetGalley and Penguin Group/Viking for the free copy!
It is not a bad book, but I wasn't engaged with the characters or the story and I couldn't find the "point."
Thank you NetGalley and Penguin Group/Viking for the free copy!
I liked the art slant to it and the fact that Jean needed to create, but the two main characters were just so annoying I had a hard time finishing it. Thankfully it was a short book.
emotional
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Did not finish. The political and sexual themes felt clunky; I longed for a subtler, more deft hand and fewer clichés of language — not a good metaphor in sight.
A quick read--the ending felt like it was revised after being moved to a later publishing date, but perhaps that was intentional. I wish there was just one more snapshot of Elliot and Jean's relationship in the three years before Leah comes in, but leaving it vague is also for the best.
This was about two women, Leah and young woman, and Jean her stepmother. Jean had left Leah when she was quite young and the father had blocked her from seeing her again. Then Leah had eventually visited but it had been a bit of a disaster and so they hadn’t spoken in four years. And then Jean died. Jean was a much more compelling character than Leah who was pretty bland and a bit annoying. So I’m glad her chapters were quite short.
Idra Novey, TAKE WHAT YOU NEED, by Idra Novey, Viking, an imprint of Penguin Random House, expected publication March 2023
Idra Novey.
In a just world, just those two words, “IDRA NOVEY”, would be like saying Stephen King or Nora Roberts; not, mind you, that she writes like either of them, but, rather, her work deserves to be as deliriously devoured and desired, awaited and celebrated.
Having been sent her first novel, WAYS TO DISAPPEAR, before it was published, and becoming awestruck by its wisdom and insight wed with gorgeous prose, I was salivating for her second, THOSE WHO KNEW, and rather than a sophomore slump, we were treated to even more layered and evocative storytelling.
Storytelling. Yes. That. In a publishing environment where so many novels are structured and shaped in the approved MFA-mold, as if written by the same committee in the same university classroom, Idra Novey writes in a singular voice. Her plots are plots, not nascent notions around which she arranges pretty, practiced sentences, but, rather unique and compelling stories written in unexpected and thrillingly readable prose, tales always reverberant with emotional strata that grabs you and shakes you and wakens you to what literature can be.
TAKE WHAT YOU NEED has an awful lot to say about family, loss, judgment, finding a way in a world of our side/ their side, some of us tip-toeing, others of us jackbooting through life, too often unaware of — or dangerously uninterested in — how others perceive us, blithely ignorant that maybe we're part of the problem.
Leah has built a life determinedly unlike her childhood in the Alleghany Mountains of Pennsylvania, estranged from her stepmother, Jean, who had once when Leah visited her as an adult, exposed her to danger and forced her to look at the past and her stepmother in a harsh and heartbreaking light. When Jean dies, Leah returns to the uber-rural scene of their falling away from each other, and is faced with the giant, welded sculptures Jean has made from the scraps of metal left behind by the now dead manufacturing industries that once existed in the backwoods wasteland. And, too, comes in contact with Elliott, who she recognizes as one of the antagonists from the dangerous night when Leah realized what Jean had become, what she had accepted as okay, and understood it to be a threat to all that Leah loved in the world — including her husband and child. Elliott had apparently been living with Jean, and the conflation of his knowing of her, Leah’s knowing of her, and Leah and Elliott’s assumptions about and fearing of one another and who they were to Jean, come together via the converging perspectives and narratives told from Leah and Jean’s point of view in this searingly truthful, honest, and heart rending novel.
At the risk of imposing on Idra Novey’s gorgeous novel my own perspective, what struck me as genius about this was the way in which she took a riveting story and played with its beginnings, middles, and ends, creating this mosaic, a whole, which so brilliantly captures what is going on in the world today. How many of us in the last eight years have discovered we don’t know — didn’t know — people we loved, or we believed loved us and thought as did we politically, philosophically, humanly? How many of us have tried — are trying every day to make something of beauty from what is left after the destruction of the once presumed unity in the world. How we struggle every day in a reality where hatred and indifference and violence are not only no longer surprising anomalies, but, rather, the stuff of the daily.
And how do we survive it? How do we trust? How do we walk through this miasmal uncertainty, and recognize what we need, take what we need in order to live another day?
In TAKE WHAT YOU NEED, Idra Novey has described in compelling, tension filled, carefully wrought writing, that very shared situation and conundrum in a personal and beautifully rendered novel.
100% recommend. Read it and encourage others to do so. Talk about it. Think about it, Let it into your heart and perhaps, as literature can and should, it will change you for the better.
Idra Novey.
In a just world, just those two words, “IDRA NOVEY”, would be like saying Stephen King or Nora Roberts; not, mind you, that she writes like either of them, but, rather, her work deserves to be as deliriously devoured and desired, awaited and celebrated.
Having been sent her first novel, WAYS TO DISAPPEAR, before it was published, and becoming awestruck by its wisdom and insight wed with gorgeous prose, I was salivating for her second, THOSE WHO KNEW, and rather than a sophomore slump, we were treated to even more layered and evocative storytelling.
Storytelling. Yes. That. In a publishing environment where so many novels are structured and shaped in the approved MFA-mold, as if written by the same committee in the same university classroom, Idra Novey writes in a singular voice. Her plots are plots, not nascent notions around which she arranges pretty, practiced sentences, but, rather unique and compelling stories written in unexpected and thrillingly readable prose, tales always reverberant with emotional strata that grabs you and shakes you and wakens you to what literature can be.
TAKE WHAT YOU NEED has an awful lot to say about family, loss, judgment, finding a way in a world of our side/ their side, some of us tip-toeing, others of us jackbooting through life, too often unaware of — or dangerously uninterested in — how others perceive us, blithely ignorant that maybe we're part of the problem.
Leah has built a life determinedly unlike her childhood in the Alleghany Mountains of Pennsylvania, estranged from her stepmother, Jean, who had once when Leah visited her as an adult, exposed her to danger and forced her to look at the past and her stepmother in a harsh and heartbreaking light. When Jean dies, Leah returns to the uber-rural scene of their falling away from each other, and is faced with the giant, welded sculptures Jean has made from the scraps of metal left behind by the now dead manufacturing industries that once existed in the backwoods wasteland. And, too, comes in contact with Elliott, who she recognizes as one of the antagonists from the dangerous night when Leah realized what Jean had become, what she had accepted as okay, and understood it to be a threat to all that Leah loved in the world — including her husband and child. Elliott had apparently been living with Jean, and the conflation of his knowing of her, Leah’s knowing of her, and Leah and Elliott’s assumptions about and fearing of one another and who they were to Jean, come together via the converging perspectives and narratives told from Leah and Jean’s point of view in this searingly truthful, honest, and heart rending novel.
At the risk of imposing on Idra Novey’s gorgeous novel my own perspective, what struck me as genius about this was the way in which she took a riveting story and played with its beginnings, middles, and ends, creating this mosaic, a whole, which so brilliantly captures what is going on in the world today. How many of us in the last eight years have discovered we don’t know — didn’t know — people we loved, or we believed loved us and thought as did we politically, philosophically, humanly? How many of us have tried — are trying every day to make something of beauty from what is left after the destruction of the once presumed unity in the world. How we struggle every day in a reality where hatred and indifference and violence are not only no longer surprising anomalies, but, rather, the stuff of the daily.
And how do we survive it? How do we trust? How do we walk through this miasmal uncertainty, and recognize what we need, take what we need in order to live another day?
In TAKE WHAT YOU NEED, Idra Novey has described in compelling, tension filled, carefully wrought writing, that very shared situation and conundrum in a personal and beautifully rendered novel.
100% recommend. Read it and encourage others to do so. Talk about it. Think about it, Let it into your heart and perhaps, as literature can and should, it will change you for the better.