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For fans of Fleishman is in Trouble and Such a Fun Age, an electrifying novel about six longtime friends whose tropical vacation is interrupted by an unexpected crisis, forcing them to ask how strong their bonds really are.
Clare is supposed to be the grown-up one. Married to the love of her life, with a major deal for her first novel, she has everything she thought she wanted. So then why does it all feel so wrong? When she agrees to a weeklong vacation with five of her oldest friends, she is hoping for an escape with the people who know her best. There is Jessie, who won't stop talking about her new boyfriend; Mac, trying to pretend he hasn't outgrown the group; Kyle, the eternal peacemaker; and Renzo, who brought them all together but keeps picking fights. And then, of course, there's Liam, the guy Clare has barely seen since high school but somehow can't get out of her head―or her bed.
But when a terrifying news alert shatters their peace, it becomes harder to ignore how much the world has changed since they were teenagers. As the resentments and tensions that have always simmered just beneath the surface begin to boil, Clare must ask if their shared history is enough to sustain their friendships, or if growing up might mean letting go.
With crackling wit and emotional fearlessness, When We Grow Up is a provocative portrait of friendship in a world that feels ever more unrecognizable and a searing exploration of what it means to be a good person.
"The friends' conversations provide a sounding board for the author to riff on racism, climate change, and other contemporary issues—for instance, when Clare schools Jessie on anti-racist campus protestors—but the conversations barely scratch the surface. This one fizzles." —Publishers Weekly
A delayed coming-of-age story that's both perceptive and absorbing." —Kirkus Reviews
"This novel leans heavily on its setting and will appeal to readers who gravitate toward dramatic relationship fiction, a sort of cross between Hanya Yanihariga's A Little Life and the 1985 Brat Pack movie St. Elmo's Fire." —Library Journal
"Sharply observed, sardonic, engaging, intimate, and evocative, When We Grow Up delves into the ways we try and fail to form and foster friendships, both before and after we know how to love well or thoughtfully. It confronts the damage that we cause, the violences we miss, as we bumble through discovering who we are. An exploration of how impossible it can feel, in the face of a world that seems so often invested in our imminent destruction, to want and know how to be good." ―Lynn Steger Strong, author of Flight
"When We Grow Up is novel as anthropological investigation, a study of the class of people for whom adulthood begins at thirty. I laughed, I winced, and I saw much I recognized in Baker's exploration of how the self is forged not only by the circumstances of our birth and family and education but by our peers and friends." ―Rumaan Alam, New York Times bestselling author of Entitlement and Leave the World Behind
This information about When We Grow Up was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Angelica Baker is the author of the novels Our Little Racket and When We Grow Up. Her essays and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, Vogue, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Literary Hub. She lives in Eugene, Oregon, with her husband and two sons.
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