Review by Booklist Review
Bloom returns to fiction (following her 2022 memoir, In Love) with the story of a chosen family. After WWII, Gazala makes her way from Paris to New York, where Alma and Anne Cohen adopt her as an honorary sister. Gazala and her orphaned sibling, Samir, are reunited in New York, running a successful business and making a home in Poughkeepsie. In time, their unconventional family expands from the Greats (Gazala, Samir, Alma, Anne, and Anne's partner, Honey) to include Anne's daughter, Lily, Lily's child, Harry, and Gazala and Samir's "foundling," Bea, none of whom follows a straightforward path to romantic love. The novel moves fluidly back and forth in time and between characters, peeling back the layers of a lifetime of love and loss. Throughout, the Cohen girls refer to the Dead People's Party, "a mental get-together of everyone you've ever known who mattered." In many ways, this novel exemplifies this idea, bringing together past and present versions of the Greats and their loved ones. Recommend to fans of Anne Tyler and Elizabeth Berg.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Bloom (White Houses) continues her exploration of what it means to be a family with this stimulating story of a Frenchwoman who builds a new life in the U.S. after WWII. In 1942, 17-year-old Gazala goes to work as a masseuse for the writer Colette. After the war, Colette helps Gazala immigrate to New York City, where she takes up her deceased father's trade as a baker and befriends two customers, sisters Anne and Alma Cohen, and regularly joins them for family dinners. Shortly thereafter, her adopted older brother, Samir, shows up out of the blue and the two become life partners and secret lovers. The Cohen sisters along with Anne's partner, Honey, form such a tight bond with Gazala and Samir that they think of each other as family and make plans to leave the city for Poughkeepsie, where Gazala and Samir eventually run a department store. Their makeshift family extends to include Anne's daughter and grandson and the granddaughter of their real estate agent, who comes to live with Gazala and Samir as a surrogate daughter. Though the story loses some steam after the siblings first arrive in America, Bloom rights the ship with her thoughtful and complex character development. It's a memorable portrait of a found family's fulfillment. Agent: Jennifer Rudolph Walsh, WME. (June)
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Review by Library Journal Review
Bloom returns to fiction after her bestselling memoir In Love (which was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist) with the decades-spanning story of four friends in New England who spin in and out of each other's lives over the years. The novel opens during World War II, when young Gazala and her brother Samir--orphaned Algerian immigrants living in poverty in France--must do whatever it takes to survive. Forced to split up, they each make their way independently to New York City after the war and ultimately reunite. While in New York, Gazala meets a pair of sisters named Anne and Alma and forges a lifelong bond with them. Relationships are truly at the heart of this slim novel, and readers are rewarded with Bloom's signature empathetic writing style as she explores the many ways that there are to love and care for other people. As the novel slips back and forth in time, narrated from the perspectives of each of the main characters, readers will find themselves continually surprised and moved by the choices they make, the secrets they keep, and how they show up for one another. VERDICT Bloom's (White Houses) insightful new novel is a quick and affecting read. Recommended for all collections.--Elizabeth Walline
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
An unconventional chosen family spreads its branches over decades and continents. Bloom's latest opens with a deathbed scene that introduces the core cast of her lively but elliptical narrative, which hopscotches from France in the 1930s and '40s to Mexico in the 1980s to the Hudson Valley in the 1990s and 2010s, adding numerous key characters along the way. (Get out your pencil and paper, because you're not going to be able to remember who's who without taking notes.) At the center of the ensemble are Gazala and Samir Benamar, a French Algerian sister and brother who are orphaned in prewar Paris. Typical of this novel, their baker father is killed off in a single, glancing sentence: "We do not arrange for a proper burial." Similarly, we are told only in passing that Samir was adopted as a baby by Gazala's parents, a fact worth recalling when the two, after many years of separation, reunite and become lovers. A wonderful section has Gazala working for the writer Colette during the Vichy occupation and meeting her friend the jewelry designer Suzanne Belperron (do Google to get a peek at her work). After the war, Gazala emigrates to New York and becomes a baker herself. There she meets the Cohen family, whose daughters, Alma and Anne, become part of the core group known as the Greats, pillars of the chosen family, the ones who eventually gather at Gazala's deathbed. Anne Cohen will eventually leave her husband, Richard, for his sister, Honey, a novelist. Early in the novel, a shaggy-dog storytelling game called Barbary Lion Escapes is introduced; later we learn of another one called Dead People's Party, "a mental get-together of everyone you've ever known who mattered." Well, this novel is Barbary Lion meets Dead People's Party--full of surprises, wild leaps and turns, and many fascinating people who love each other. Warm, rich, beautifully written, and very hard to follow. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
