Review: The Interestings

The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer

My rating: 5 of 5 stars



Kudos to Lisa for recommending another great book to me. I really enjoyed this...it's about six friends who attend an arts summer camp together as teenagers, and their relationships for the next 20+ years of their lives. It was especially fun to read this while on my summer vacation, although to call it a trashy summer read would be to minimize the compelling writing.

All six characters in this book were well-conceived although not all given equal airtime in the story. Jules is at this camp on scholarship, from the suburbs. Noah is the son of a famous folk singer. Ash and Goodman are siblings, raised in Manhattan. Ethan is a dorky but talented cartoonist. And Cathy is a dancer whose body is not cut out for it.

What was best about the construction of the book was how Wolitzer would follow one of the characters for a few chapters, then catch up with another one. It wasn't done in an exact rotation, but it wasn't haphazard either - when you had to know something new about one of the characters, she flipped to them.

The story itself was predictable - not in that I knew what would happen, but in that there were lovers, marriages, illnesses, and betrayals. The kind of saga that Messud's Emperor's Children wanted to be.

This was one I was sad to see end.



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