Author: Zoe Whitall
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publisher: Ballentine Books
Publication Date: September 14, 2021
Book Description: It’s 1997 and Missy is a cellist in an indie rock band on tour across America. At twentytwo years old, she gets on stage every night and plays the song about her absent mother that made the band famous. As the only girl in the band, she’s determined to party just as hard as everyone else, loving and leaving a guy in every town. But then she meets a tomboy drummer who is hard to forget, and a forgotten flap of cocaine strands her at the border.
Fortysomething Carola is just surfacing from a sex scandal at the yoga center where she has been living when she sees her daughter, Missy, for the first time in ten years—on the cover of a music magazine.
Ruth is eighty-three and planning her return to the Turkish seaside village where she spent her childhood. But when her granddaughter, Missy, winds up crashing at her house, she decides it’s time that the strong and stubborn women in her family find a way to understand one another again.
In this sharply observed novel, Zoe Whittall captures three very different women who each struggle to build an authentic life. Definitions of family, romance, gender, and love will radically change as they seek out lives that are nothing less than spectacular.
Rating: 5 Stars
Review: The story of a mother and daughter separated when Carola, Missy’s mother leaves to join something of a cult. When the novel opens, Missy is a cellist in a Punk Rock Band that is starting to get big. She wants to get her tubes tied but no doctor will perform this surgery given her age. Carola is the center of scandal against the leader of the group that she has been living with for many years.
This is told over many years, Carola having many regrets over leaving her daughter, and Missy forever not wanting to get pregnant until she want’s to get pregnant.
The Spectacular is a very complex story of two women, connected through blood but very different in the way they live their lives. While the author shows two very different lives, they do converge to something very special, how they get these is the best part.
I absolutely loved this one. This genre is completely in my wheelhouse, but these characters are both interesting on their own, but something special together.
Thank you NetGalley and Ballentine Books for an Advanced Reader’s Copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.
Obsessed Bookaholic 