The Nest - Cynthia D'Aprix Sweetney

[goodreads]

Title: The Nest
Author: Cynthia D'Aprix Sweetney
Genre: Fiction
Rating: 3/5
# pages: 373 pages
Date read: August, 2016

Every family has its problems. But even among the most troubled, the Plumb family stands out as spectacularly dysfunctional. Years of simmering tensions finally reach a breaking point on an unseasonably cold afternoon in New York City as Melody, Beatrice, and Jack Plumb gather to confront their charismatic and reckless older brother, Leo, freshly released from rehab. Months earlier, an inebriated Leo got behind the wheel of a car with a nineteen-year-old waitress as his passenger. The ensuing accident has endangered the Plumbs joint trust fund, “The Nest,” which they are months away from finally receiving. Meant by their deceased father to be a modest mid-life supplement, the Plumb siblings have watched The Nest’s value soar along with the stock market and have been counting on the money to solve a number of self-inflicted problems.

Melody, a wife and mother in an upscale suburb, has an unwieldy mortgage and looming college tuition for her twin teenage daughters. Jack, an antiques dealer, has secretly borrowed against the beach cottage he shares with his husband, Walker, to keep his store open. And Bea, a once-promising short-story writer, just can’t seem to finish her overdue novel. Can Leo rescue his siblings and, by extension, the people they love? Or will everyone need to reimagine the future they’ve envisioned? Brought together as never before, Leo, Melody, Jack, and Beatrice must grapple with old resentments, present-day truths, and the significant emotional and financial toll of the accident, as well as finally acknowledge the choices they have made in their own lives.


I browsed through the first few chapters at a bookstore and found myself strangely intrigued, despite the fact that the blurb on the back of the book hadn't really caught my fancy. Still, I couldn't stop thinking about it, and ended up getting hold of an e-copy a few days later.

Once again, this is a character-driven narrative rather than a plot-driven one. The plot itself is very quickly explained, but the people themselves - this highly dysfunctional family - are fascinating. I found myself putting the book down frequently, as I could see this person or that heading towards a bad decision, but I kept picking it back up, as I grew to care about the siblings, and had to know how everything got resolved.

An intriguing read about people I grew to care about... but am not really sure I like very much.