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A review by gigiivid
A Fortunate Age by Joanna Rakoff
1.0
Don’t even know where to begin with how awful, depressing and useless this book was. The one thing that it was was well written. As in, the flow and choice of words were perfectly fine. The style of writing was fine. There were quite a few grammatical errors but I tend not to hold that against books.
Everything else was pretty bad. Firstly, in terms of its content, the characters were lifeless voids that all blended into one (had to constantly look back at the first chapter to see their original descriptions). New York felt dull and gray in its descriptions. The world they inhabited was flat. I didn’t care, couldn’t care, and was reading because I always read all books I start.
The story itself was so odd — any big event, big moment, big twist happened OFF SCREEN. All of them, 100%. In what I imagine is some sort of misguided attempt at literature or a theme, all the moments described were off-kilter realisation moments leading up to the actual plot. You read about them meeting someone for the first time, and then you found out 400 words later that they had married that person. This only lended to the lifelessness of everything else and made the book particularly depressing. Characters struggled through their 20s joylessly and with not very much happening. My 20s (the couple of years of them I’ve had so far) certainly don’t seem as horrifically dull and sad as they guys’....In that sense, there was no way this book could be relatable. I in fact have a little group of 6 friends from university with the exact same gender make up and yet I saw nothing in this book reflecting us despite being the literal target audience/person she was writing about. The bleakness of them getting these great jobs, in particular, was hard to stomach, when the reader was meant to feel empathetic for their rise and decline, when in fact all I could think was how it was all the characters’ faults in every way possible. Total miss. The ending was meant to be some poignant significant moment when in fact it totally missed any sort of framing or resolution by randomly picking an assortment of characters to do something together at the end. Most of this book did in fact feel random.
Finally, the pretentiousness of this book really got to me. Only ART people are REALLY living. Only NEW YORKERS are REALLY living. Only people who went to this very specific college in the US that I’ve never heard of (but, surprisingly, the author went to!!) are REALLY informed on anything....Oh please. Self-indulgence to the max, and it got very boring after a few pages. Unless of course we were meant to roll our eyes and hate them all for their ridiculous hang ups, but something tells me that’s definitely not the case.....
All in all, wowee, haven’t quite read a book like this that I’ve quite so personally disliked and have disconnected with on such a strong level. Naturally, wouldn’t recommend....
Everything else was pretty bad. Firstly, in terms of its content, the characters were lifeless voids that all blended into one (had to constantly look back at the first chapter to see their original descriptions). New York felt dull and gray in its descriptions. The world they inhabited was flat. I didn’t care, couldn’t care, and was reading because I always read all books I start.
The story itself was so odd — any big event, big moment, big twist happened OFF SCREEN. All of them, 100%. In what I imagine is some sort of misguided attempt at literature or a theme, all the moments described were off-kilter realisation moments leading up to the actual plot. You read about them meeting someone for the first time, and then you found out 400 words later that they had married that person. This only lended to the lifelessness of everything else and made the book particularly depressing. Characters struggled through their 20s joylessly and with not very much happening. My 20s (the couple of years of them I’ve had so far) certainly don’t seem as horrifically dull and sad as they guys’....In that sense, there was no way this book could be relatable. I in fact have a little group of 6 friends from university with the exact same gender make up and yet I saw nothing in this book reflecting us despite being the literal target audience/person she was writing about. The bleakness of them getting these great jobs, in particular, was hard to stomach, when the reader was meant to feel empathetic for their rise and decline, when in fact all I could think was how it was all the characters’ faults in every way possible. Total miss. The ending was meant to be some poignant significant moment when in fact it totally missed any sort of framing or resolution by randomly picking an assortment of characters to do something together at the end. Most of this book did in fact feel random.
Finally, the pretentiousness of this book really got to me. Only ART people are REALLY living. Only NEW YORKERS are REALLY living. Only people who went to this very specific college in the US that I’ve never heard of (but, surprisingly, the author went to!!) are REALLY informed on anything....Oh please. Self-indulgence to the max, and it got very boring after a few pages. Unless of course we were meant to roll our eyes and hate them all for their ridiculous hang ups, but something tells me that’s definitely not the case.....
All in all, wowee, haven’t quite read a book like this that I’ve quite so personally disliked and have disconnected with on such a strong level. Naturally, wouldn’t recommend....