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THANK YOU FOR BEING YOUNG

SO WE CAN DUMP OUR PROBLEMS ON YOU!

Spirited and grounded, Lerner's condemnation of the institutional nature of youth discrimination and plea for fairness is,...

Awards & Accolades

Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
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Venture capital investor Lerner calls attention to the alarmingly prevalent, counter-productive discrimination that thwarts young adults in the United States from making their mark on the culture.

It’s Lerner's desire to right a somewhat inconspicuous but pernicious, sweeping wrong: Young adults, say in the age range of 18 to their mid-30s, do not have nearly the same opportunities as older adults, which "is unfair, unjustified, and unsustainable, and therefore discriminatory." (That discrimination is even written into the Constitution; witness the age requirements for various offices.) Adding to the young adults' problematical situation, adults who are upwards of 40 years old have used their baseless entitlement to take a myopically short-term approach to their political, fiscal and social responsibilities—from natural resource depletion to issues of public debt, infrastructure and healthcare—which are then fobbed off on young adults to handle. Lerner can get a little hot under the collar when addressing the more egregious, mean-spirited acts perpetrated by oldsters, and the fumes add a nice acrid bite to the proceedings. But mostly he has plain-spoken commonsense, backed by a thoughtful array of statistics, on his side as he asks that if we are going to demand that 18-year-olds are adults, they must be given a fair, equal shot at tapping into the many great potential benefits that come with those responsibilities. Lerner presents all the roadblocks young adults find as they pursue careers in medicine, law, academia and the corporate world—"[p]romotions do not come quickly when there are layers of older mid-level executives clamoring for the executive suite," especially when seniority is the measure of all things—as well as plenty of instances in which youth trumped age in thoughtful decision-making. Most of all, he makes the case for the youthful qualities of risk, thinking big and embracing innovation as a boon for the greater commonweal, and the importance of high-quality jobs being available, through merit, to young adults.

Spirited and grounded, Lerner's condemnation of the institutional nature of youth discrimination and plea for fairness is, quite simply, right on. 

Pub Date: Nov. 16, 2011

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Smashwords

Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2011

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THE MOST FUN WE EVER HAD

Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...

Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.

Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.

Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet another pleasurable tendril of sisterly malice uncurls.

Pub Date: June 25, 2019

ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2

Page Count: 544

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019

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THEN SHE WAS GONE

Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.

Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.

Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.

Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.

Pub Date: April 24, 2018

ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5

Page Count: 368

Publisher: Atria

Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018

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