A review by babewithabookandabeer
There's Going to Be Trouble by Jen Silverman

emotional hopeful informative inspiring reflective medium-paced

5.0

Thank you Random House for my Netgalley copy of THERE’S GOING TO BE TROUBLE by Jen Silverman, out 4/9/24!

This may be in my top reads of the year! I loved this book - it’s everything I love in a novel. It has both French and American history, multiple love affairs, radical activism for the working class, time jumps, dualing POV’s that make sense around the halfway mark and family above all.

The overarching theme: The course of your life can change with one split-second decision.

Minnow has always tried to lead the life her single father modeled—private, quiet, hardworking, apolitical. So she is rocked when an instinctive decision to help a student makes her the extremely public face of a scandal in the small town where she teaches. As tensions rise, vandalism and death threats follow, and an overwhelmed Minnow flees to a teaching position in Paris. 

There, Minnow falls into an exhilarating and all-consuming relationship with Charles, a young Frenchman whose activism has placed him at odds with his powerful family. As Minnow is pulled into the daring protest Charles and his friends are planning, she unknowingly draws close to repeating a secret tragedy from her family's past. For her father wasn’t always the restrained, conservative man he appears today. There are things he has taken great pains to bury from his family and from the world. 

In 1968, Keen is avoiding the Vietnam draft by pursuing a PhD at Harvard. He lives his life in the basement chemistry lab, studiously avoiding the news. But when he unexpectedly falls in love with Olya, a fiery community organizer, he is consumed by her world and loses sight of his own. Learning that his deferment has ended and he’s been drafted, Keen agrees to participate in the latest action that Olya is organizing—one with more dangerous and far-reaching consequences than he could have imagined. 

The Vienam War and the activism of the late 60’s is a moment in time I am very intrigued by. Any book that tackles the heartbreak of this time in a way as good as this novel has my full attention. This book is smart, suspenseful, engaging and revolutionary. I loved every second of it and I didn’t want it to end.

It keeps you on the edge of your seat, wondering what is going to happen to each character. And the main protagonists are SO enticing. I love their thoughts, I love their way of thinking, I love the way they are challenged and their growth is astronomical. The book leaves you thinking deeply about every aspect of your life and existence and the way the world works. Jen Silverman - you are amazing! I will read anything you write. I am going to be thinking about this one for a long time.