When I read a review of Alice Adam’s Invincible Summer that described it as a novel that attempts to define a generation, specifically GenX, I couldn’t get my hands on it fast enough. I’m all in for GenX novels, being a GenXer myself and kind of loving the zeitgeist we came of age in for purely narcissistic reasons.

However, this is not my GenX or at least not the way I experienced it. Perhaps that has more to do with this novel taking place in England and my life taking place in the United States, the midwest specifically. While there is the occasional mention of a Doc Marten or The Pixies, which perked me up, this one kind of meandered about for 20ish years and then ends.

We follow a quartet of friends from college graduation day until they’re well into their forties. Eva is the only child of a widowed professor who decides to abandon her physics degree and go into finance. Benedict is the loaded academic who pursues his PhD in physics and hangs out in Cern with the large hadron collider. Sylvie is a flighty artist with a drinking problem and Lucien is her older brother who never went to college, and deals in shadiness while purporting to be a DJ.

Of course there are love triangles and some talk of selling out. The friendships are white-hot intense at times and then lapse into dormancy for years. The whole thing is just terribly predictable. Kids, careers, houses, addiction, infertility, economic recession. . . ho hum. None of the characters are particularly charming or insightful and the story bumps along until it’s done. It’s the kind of book that elicits a shrug. And while the characters are GenX in that they were born at the appropriate times, it’s not very GenX-y. Bleh.

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Tess is a twenty-two-year-old running from, I think, boredom, claiming she was reborn when she crossed the George Washington bridge. Upon arriving in New York City, Tess gets a job at one of the best restaurants in town. The kind of restaurant where “back waiters” can make $60K a year, which is pretty okay in the Midwest, but probably not so much when you live in Brooklyn. I’m not sure why I mention this, maybe because it’s a detail I remember.

Sweetbitter by Stephanie Danler is Tess’ story of a year at this fancy pants restaurant. That’s all it is. Don’t expect a plot. There is none to be found. This is just a very nicely written, often frustrating slice of life masquerading as a novel.

The work is back-breaking and humiliating, but Tess quickly falls in love with the restaurant and her various co-workers, specially older, sophisticated server-extraordinaire Simone, and hunky bartender Jake, who is a lifelong friend (or lover, maybe?) of Simone’s. Tess also falls in love with wine, oysters, New York in general, and the sound of her own voice.

Oof, this one was frustrating. Make no mistake Danler is a great writer. Some of her observations are spot on, especially about nostalgia and how people mourn specific neighborhoods and eras even though they never experienced them. But the problem is that this is very much the story of a 22-year-old who is deeply in love with her twenty-two-year-oldness. Every drunken night out is worthy of endless analysis; every time the cute guy winks, grunts, or ignores you is worthy of the same analysis; and same goes for the pretty, older woman who pays attention to you. The monotony of these scenes are brutal.

It doesn’t help that Tess treats every situation and person with the same breathless, full-bore emotion — the only thing that changes is whether she super loves or super hates. The line between these two is razor thin.

This is a book that will feel familiar to anyone who had that post-college filled with hope, marking time waiting for your real life to begin experience. This is the same story no matter where the twenty-two/three-year-old is. . . midwestern gas station, Manhattan restaurant, Pacific northwest nonprofit. There isn’t much new here and you have to have a strong will to get through the boring to get to the good. Also you have to have the stomach for the pithy, second-person sections that begin each chapter.

I’m curious to see what Danler will do if she ever writes a book with an actual plot. I bet that one’s gonna be great.

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For a wholly different and more enthusiastic take on All the Missing Girls, I’d like to direct you to LeAnn’s review. She loved this one. I did not.

A few weeks ago I expounded on my theories about mysteries whereby some are thrillingly good and literally keep you guessing while some rely on writerly tricks and coyness to keep the reader in the dark. All the Missing Girls is just that kind of mystery. It’s a mystery mostly told in reverse. Why? Because the narrator knows whodunnit on the first day and, well, there would be no book if she told her story straight.

Bah humbug!

This one starts out in a pretty straightforward manner, Nicolette Farrell returns from Philadelphia to the small North Carolina town she escaped after high school graduation ten years ago. She’s there to help her older brother sell their father’s house. Dad is in a nursing home suffering from dementia and is not too keen, in his more lucid moments, about selling the house.

Nic’s not too keen to be back in town. She’s got an ex-boyfriend lurking around, the memories of her high school BFF/frenemy who went missing the summer Nic left, and, oddly, another pretty blonde girl goes missing as soon as Nik arrives.

From there we jump ahead fifteen days and Nik starts unspooling the story of what happened to ten years ago when she left and Corinne Prescott went missing and how that mirrors the current disappearance of Annaleise, who was dating Nic’s high school boyfriend, Tyler, when she went missing.

This one is frustrating and unsatisfying, because the reader spends a lot of time doing some sort of mental yoga to figure out why the story is being told backward. Choosing to tell the story like this is the opposite of building suspense. Each time we jump back a day you’re reminded that “oh yeah, this happened the day before and so I already know everyone is okay.”

The writerly device is annoying and when you toss that onto a bunch of half-formed characters who have not grown at all in ten years and revolve them all around a plot that is basically “teen girls are mean and stupid” you’re left with a heaping helping of are you kidding me.

If you’re in the mood for a mystery, skip this one and pick up Sheri Lapena’s The Couple Next Door.

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First things first, Wendy Walker’s All is Not Forgotten starts with a pretty graphic description of rape. Teenage Jenny Kramer is brutally raped for an hour outside a party in her affluent Connecticut town. When her parents get to the hospital where their daughter has been taken they are given the option of giving Jenny a controversial drug that will erase her memory of the event. It’s a drug given to victims of PTSD to help them cope with trauma.

A year later Jenny’s not doing so well. She’s panicked and depressed and isn’t sure why. Eventually her parents take her to see psychiatrist Dr. Alan Forrester, who firmly believes that this drug is total bullshit and the only way to survive and thrive after trauma is to work through it.

Dr. Alan Forrester is a smug bastard. Insufferable really. And sadly, he’s the narrator of this story and kind of ruins it all with his condescension and arrogance. Whenever he gets into the nitty gritty details of Jenny’s rape he constantly mentions about how her “virtue was stolen.” There’s a lot of talk of virtue.

There’s also a lot of talk about Jenny’s crybaby dad, Thomas, and her cool, calculating mother, Charlotte.

Did I mention that Alan Forrester, our narrator, is a prick? Because he is. He’s also trying to make a name for himself as the leading expert on dealing with people who have taken this controversial drug and have had it fail miserably. While he’s working with Kramers, Alan tells us a lot about Sean, an Iraqi war vet who lost and arm and his entire battalion in an ambush.

Forrester also tells us a lot about how smart he is, how great he is because he volunteers at a near-by maximum security prison to work with inmates, and how he likes his pretty, but not-as-smart-as-he-is wife and his privileged little bastard of a son.

Ugh. Barf.

The premise of this one is so interesting — how the body might remember trauma that has been wiped from our memories — but is completely ruined by not just the insufferable narrator, but by some pretty major coincidences that needed to happen to make the “mystery” work.

If you’re really into peculiar narration choices and how those might (or might not work) this one is a good one for you. if you don’t like reading about insufferable douchebags who like to comment on the virtue of rape victims, skip it.

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Not much will keep Katie and Eric Knox from helping their fifteen-year-old achieve her Olympic gymnastics dream — not mountains of credit card debt, falling apart cars, or their younger son, maybe not even murder.

Things are going swell for Katie and Eric and their coterie of gymnastic boosters, coaches, and young gymnasts. The gym is doing well and the star, the Knox’s daughter Devon, is on her way to winning double-plus gold elite super on the way to the Olympics status. All she needs to do is stick that landing in the vault at the big competition a few weeks away. But then one of their band of merry gymnastics hangers-on is killed in a mysterious hit and run, and then the claws come out.

There’s wild speculation from the boosters (a group of parents determined to do anything for their competitive daughters), the gymnasts, and the coaches about what could have happened.

Katie’s left to navigate the ever shifting loyalties and boundaries of their ever faltering gymnastics world and she really begins to question what she has sacrificed for Devon’s career? Hobby? and whether or not it is worth it.

You Will Know Me is typical Megan Abbott fair — a group of frenemy teen girls and the adults with slippery morals who support them. At least that’s what I think of as typical Abbott fair. I’ve only read Dare Me, which I wasn’t fan of.

However, in this one, Abbot’s got her ducks in a row and has written a mystery that is less about the actual whodunit and more about the what will they do now, which seems much more satisfying to me, since the whodunit is pretty obvious from the get go. Though, to be fair, she does throw in some wrenches so you question what you think you know and don’t get annoyed when what you thought comes true.

Aside from getting an inside look into the competitive world of gymnastics, which Abbot writes about wonderfully, this is really a story about a mother and what she’s willing to do for her daughter. I liked reading about Katie’s struggles, how she dealt with the mounting evidence that someone she knows may have committed murder, and how this tragedy made her question everything in her life, even the love she had for her husband which had been pretty steadfast up to that point.

What I enjoyed the most about this book is that I really was guessing about what was going to happen right up to the end and when I got there it was really satisfying. I didn’t see it coming, but it didn’t feel like a trick either. Like I said, she sticks the landing on this one.

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