Review by Booklist Review
Ginder is the author of five previous novels, including The People We Hate at the Wedding (2017), which was made into a movie in 2022. His latest follows a group of friends over the course of 20 years as they gather at important junctures in their lives, from stumbling into young adulthood to settling down (or not) with partners to tackling the trials of middle age. Flashbacks introduce the six college friends and unspool their defining characteristics. Beginning with a New Year's Eve party, each successive chapter offers a shifting perspective for a deeper, more dimensional interpretation of the recalled events. Even when life changes, arguments and resentments temporarily create distance between them, the group remains bonded by loyalty and a deep understanding of each other. The ensemble cast is carefully constructed, and each member is memorable, unique, and well defined. Ginder creates some genuinely hilarious, believable scenes tempered with touches of pathos. Fans of films like The Four Seasons, The Big Chill, and St. Elmo's Fire will appreciate the witty banter, poignant moments, and dynamic interplay that Ginder skillfully orchestrates.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Ginder (Let's Not Do That Again) follows five college friends as they approach middle age in his funny and poignant latest. In 2007, two years after graduating from the University of Pennsylvania, Richie's friends join him at his crowded New Year's Eve party in Lower Manhattan. From there, the story unfolds in a series of occasions over the next decade, including a Cancún wedding in 2014 for friends of Mia's, Adam's Labor Day party in the Hamptons in 2018, and Sasha and Theo's 2022 Halloween party in New Jersey. Along the way, the reader learns about Adam's longtime crush on Richie, Marco's on-and-off relationship with Mia before settling down with another woman and starting a family, Richie's increasingly destructive dependence on booze and cocaine, Sasha's difficult pregnancy and labor, and much more. The novel runs on its deliciously witty dialogue, as when Mia tells Richie's new roommate in 2007 that living with him "is liable to get you on the FBI's Most Wanted list," but Ginder counterpoints the humor with unsparing wisdom, as when he writes of the epiphany that Mia has in Cancun: "Things would change little by little, until they didn't recognize each other at all." Throughout, Ginder effectively portrays the recurring joy of lasting friendships along with the pain of growing apart. It's a triumph. Agent: Richard Pine, Inkwell Management. (Feb.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
Ginder (Let's Not Do That Again) serves up a sharp exploration of relationships and the curious blend of love and resentment they bear. This is the story of a group of college friends whose lives and relationships play out through five parties thrown over a span of 20 years. Readers meet the three main characters, Sasha, Mia, and Adam, at the first party, hosted on New Year's Eve in New York City, two years after their college graduation. As they launch into adulthood, the friends believe that they'll always have each other. But life, the choices the friends make as they age, and their nostalgia for old times are not always compatible. With each party, Ginder hands the narrative to different characters, offering readers access to their deepest thoughts--the insights they don't share with their friends--which allows for nuanced, layered character development. The result is an interesting (but not necessarily uplifting) meditation on friendship, time, and the ways people try to hold on to each other even as they drift apart. VERDICT Ginder does not disappoint with this exploration of relatably flawed characters in a novel that is a terrific choice for book clubs.--Margie Ticknor
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
Checking in on a group of college friends as they face the realities of adulthood, one party at a time. It's two years after graduation from the University of Pennsylvania when we meet them, running out of mixers but not cocaine as they ring in 2008 at a New Year's Eve party at the funky Lower East Side apartment of a couple of the guys. The point of view rotates among five key players of the extended group as they explore who they've become and what they feel about each other now. Looks like some are headed for love, others for substance abuse, others for lucrative careers. We will watch these threads play out as we look in on them four more times: at a Cancún wedding in 2014, a Labor Day birthday party in Amagansett in 2018, a Halloween party in suburban New Jersey in 2022, and, ineluctably, a funeral in lower Manhattan in 2024. The antic high spirits of Ginder's earlier work--the first,The People We Hate at the Wedding (2017), was truly a riot--have shaded bittersweet; this book is about the pains of aging and the ripple effect of mistakes. Not to say there aren't still some acerbically funny lines and great set pieces. One character has rejected a suitor with early onset testicular cancer: "I can't believe you walked away from a guy with cancer." "Whatever, it has a treatment rate of, like, ninety-five percent." A newly out young man discovers an obstacle to gay romance: "All they ever wanted to do was lecture him about Larry Kramer. And nothing--not coke, or Nina Guzman, or a naked Nancy Reagan--could kill a boner quite like Larry Kramer." The fact is, aging is no fun for this crowd. Whether they become parents or don't, whether they find love or don't, adulthood is a narrowing of options, a hardening of patterns, more loss than gain. "If at one point there had been a thousand paths available to her, each choice she had made had slashed that figure in half, and then in half, and then in half again." Is part of the problem that everyone is so very white and privileged, and had a thousand paths in the first place? That doesn't come up, but one wonders. Buoyant and funny page by page, this book nonetheless has a sad and serious heart. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
