By Kate Christensen
Doubleday, $25.95
Publisher's summary:
The Astral is a huge rose-colored old pile of an apartment building in the gentrifying neighborhood of Greenpoint, Brooklyn. For decades it was the happy home (or so he thought) of the poet Harry Quirk and his wife, Luz, a nurse, and of their two children: Karina, now a fervent freegan, and Hector, now in the clutches of a cultish Christian community. But Luz has found (and destroyed) some poems of Harry’s that ignite her long-simmering suspicions of infidelity, and he’s been summarily kicked out. He now has to reckon with the consequence of his literary, marital, financial, and parental failures (and perhaps others) and find his way forward—and back into Luz’s good graces.
Harry Quirk is, in short, a loser, living small and low in the water. But touched by Kate Christensen’s novelistic grace and acute perception, his floundering attempts to reach higher ground and forge a new life for himself become funny, bittersweet, and terrifically moving. She knows what secrets lurk in the hearts of men—and she turns them into literary art of the highest order.I have to be honest and tell you that I walked away from this book. I've tried for two months to read it and was never able to engage with the story or the characters. So I won't review it. I searched the net and there are a lot of fine reviews out there. So to be fair to you the reader, the author and the publisher I'm including a great review from Kirkus Reviews.
Thanks to the publishers for providing me with a review copy of this book, I did pass it on so someone else could enjoy it.
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