A Fortunate Age

Critics

• First Exit to Brooklyn

  Do you remember how bored we all were a decade ago? The cold war was over; the stock market surfed a rising wave; President Clinton had announced a national budget surplus; and good fortune was so rampant that rich neurotics paid therapists to be rea ... (read full critics)

  nytimes published on Fri, 17 Sep 2010

• A Fortunate Age By Joanna Smith Rakoff

  The television show “Seinfeld” was famous for being a “show about nothing.” Joanna Smith Rakoff’s debut novel, on the other hand, is a book about everything. A Fortunate Age covers the gamut of life experience as her characters deal with everything f ... (read full critics)

  bookpage published on Wed, 15 Sep 2010

1 Review

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  A Fortunate Age

  I finished this book several weeks ago and have delayed writing my review because I wanted to see if my reaction to this story changed any over time. Nope. This book is a huge undertaking (both from the author's point of view and the reader's). The story follows a group of college friends as they ... (continue)

  I finished this book several weeks ago and have delayed writing my review because I wanted to see if my reaction to this story changed any over time. Nope. This book is a huge undertaking (both from the author's point of view and the reader's). The story follows a group of college friends as they leave college face the real world. The author writes this epic from the point of view of 5 of the 6 members of the group. The writing is good, the flow of the story is the ultimate problem. More than a few of the characters are largely unlikeable, but just when the reader starts to feel a connection or even an interest in the character, the chapter ends and we're off on another entirely different character and sometimes an entirely different year. Sometimes the loose ends get tied up, sometimes not, leaving huge gaps in the story flow that keeps the reader feeling like they are jumping from stepping stone to stepping stone across the river of this story. Perhaps this book would have been more effective as a collection of related short stories instead of a mildly cohesive narrative.

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  Readingrat said on Feb 13, 2009 | Add your feedback

Book Details

• Rating:
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• English Books
• Hardcover 416 Pages
• ISBN-10: 1416590773
• ISBN-13: 9781416590774
• Publisher: Scribner
• Pub date: Apr 07, 2009

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