Reviews with content warning for Abandonment - The Latecomer

My goodness, this book was a commitment. I adore literary fiction, especially deep family stories, and I choose character over plot any day. That said, this book was dense and hard to get through, and the characters were challenging to form a bond with.

In this book we meet the Oppenheimer family, a wealthy Jewish American family living in New York City. We see the parents’ relationship as well as their lives outside their relationship, and we follow their children through childhood into adulthood. There’s not a strong familial bond in any direction for majority of the book and it’s essentially a collection of individual experiences.

The development is intentionally slow and if I am looking neutrally at the writing, it’s effective. My challenge as a reader was that each character in the first 80% of the book was going out of their way to be unlikeable. They’re cruel at times and it’s clear they know there will be no serious consequences. By the end, as more characters are given the floor and the initial characters evolve, I was too lost on everyone to feel a redemption arc.

The last 15-20% of the book was offbeat. The pace accelerated, attempts at personal growth were too packaged, the “twists” were sad and out of place, and it was disarming compared to the extremely slow pace in the beginning.

The topics that the book tried to tackle were all big – grief, infidelity, infertility, generational trauma, racism, privilege, religion, LGBTQ+ identity. I love and intentionally seek out books that illuminate these experiences, but ultimately it was not great to see them through the lives of the Oppenheimers.

For me, this wasn’t it. I didn’t have an issue with the slow pace or book length, and it wasn’t just that the characters were unlikeable and unapologetic. The Paper Palace had both of those elements and I really enjoyed that book. Ultimately, it was the combination of topics this book addresses being told through these characters.

Content warnings: Infertility, Death of parent, LGBTQ+ Outing, Racism, Religious bigotry, Infidelity, Abandonment

Content Warnings

savvyrosereads's review against another edition

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emotional funny hopeful informative reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

Out May 31, 2022 [Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me with an eARC in exchange for an honest review!]

Rating: 4.5/5 stars

The Latecomer is the sweeping tale of the evolution of an unusual, and extremely complicated, family—Johanna and Salo Oppenheimer and their triplets and, later, fourth child— that doesn’t always consider itself a family at all.

In many ways, this book chronicles a slow evolution of many characters, which perhaps makes it apt that my reading experience was something of an evolution as well. In the beginning, I was entertained but felt the book was an undeniably slow build. By the middle, I was charmed by the Wes Anderson/Royal Tenenbaums vibes and cheerfully reading along to see where things went. In the turn to the final section I was thoroughly gut punched, to the point where I sat up straight and just stared at the page for several seconds, blinking wildly. By the end, I was thoroughly obsessed with this book.

It’s hard for me to say too much about why I loved The Latecomer without giving things away, and I firmly feel that everyone should go in blind. But what I can say is this book is brilliantly written, sharp, smart, funny, and layered, and I will not soon forget the story it tells or the journey it took me on. It’s rare for me to be so thoroughly pulled in by a character-driven novel, but the characters are so perfectly rendered (even Harrison, who I regularly wanted to punch), and all the small threads that pulled the story together were so beautifully and intricately woven that once I started to spot them I was completely and entirely captivated. I’m entirely sure that I will be marveling at this book and my experience of it for years to come.

Recommended to anyone, but especially if you like: literary fiction that packs major twists; family drama with deep character sketches; intricately evolving stories.

CW: Infertility; infidelity; racism; anti-Semitism; some discussions of mental illness.

Content Warnings

kaylasbookgram's review against another edition

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slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

Thank you Celadon Books for the advanced copy for my honest review.

This book touched so many topics from mental health to racism to religion. I thoroughly enjoyed the story but the slow build is not for me especially in bigger books. Which is why I’m giving it a 3⭐️ for I liked it. The genres on Goodreads says this is a mystery/thriller but I didn’t get that vibe at all so I wouldn’t suggest it for someone looking for that specific genre.

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