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The follow-up to her highly praised debut story collection, The First Hurt, Rachel Sherman’s Living Room is a beautiful and disarmingly direct portrait of a family in trouble. With the tone of a modern-day Jewish The Ice Storm set in Long Island, imbued with Alice Munro’s fascination with personal history, Living Room is a deep exploration of the ripple effects of mental illness on a family, as well as a look at generational differences in mating and marriage, and a wry, wise look at suburban angst.
“The fractured lives of three generations of women told with zero sentimentality and a huge amount of heart. Living Room is edgy, moving, smart, funny and altogether human. Rachel Sherman is the real deal.” —Dani Shapiro, New York Times–bestselling author of Inheritance
“Sherman turns her unflinching, unsentimental eye once again on deepest suburbia, where personal history festers rather than heals. [Living Room] hums along, its heavier moments tempered with plenty of dark humor and incisive language; but it’s the intimate character sketches that truly resonate.” —Time Out (New York)
“Often praised for her lack of sentimentality, Sherman doesn’t hesitate to capture her characters’ weird, unbecoming thoughts . . . Her writing lends itself to the form: her story structures tight as fists, her prose terse and unadorned.” —The Rumpus
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
October 18, 2011 -
Formats
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9781890447632
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9781890447632
- File size: 1524 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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Starred review from August 24, 2009
Sherman's riveting debut novel (after the collection The First Hurt
) examines the dreams and disappointments of teenager Abby; her mother, Livia; and Abby's grandmother, twice-widowed Headie. Each of the women harbors a secret none of the others suspect: Abby drowns her crippling insecurity in alcohol; Livia has an eating disorder; and Headie's encroaching senility obscures a secret about her son, Jeffrey. Each, caught up in her own secret, neglects to notice the damage her preoccupation causes others. Vividly drawn secondary characters expand the story's breadth—Abby's bad-news friend Jenna; Jorgen, a Swedish au pair whose bad judgment nearly kills Abby; Simone, a lesbian psychiatrist Livia is attracted to for reasons she isn't quite sure of; and Jeffrey, who acts as a narrative linchpin. Unsentimental yet deeply felt, this tale examines what bubbles under the surface of a supposedly happy Long Island family.
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