Manhattan Beach
Books | Fiction / General
3.4
(718)
Jennifer Egan
* Winner of the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction * Winner of the New York City Book Award * New York Times Bestseller * A San Francisco Chronicle Top 10 Book of the Year * A New York Times Notable Book and a Washington Post Notable Fiction Book of 2017 * A Time magazine and USA Today Top 10 Novel of 2017 * Winner of the Booklist Top of the List for Fiction * Longlisted for the National Book Award for Fiction * Named a Best Book of 2017 by NPR, The Guardian, Vogue, Esquire, Kirkus Reviews, Philadelphia Inquirer, BookPage, Bustle, Southern Living, and St. Louis Post-Dispatch “Immensely satisfying…an old-fashioned page-turner, tweaked by this witty and sophisticated writer…Egan is masterly at displaying mastery…she works a formidable kind of magic.” —Dwight Garner, The New York Times The daring and magnificent novel from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of A Visit from the Goon Squad.Anna Kerrigan, nearly twelve years old, accompanies her father to visit Dexter Styles, a man who, she gleans, is crucial to the survival of her father and her family. She is mesmerized by the sea beyond the house and by some charged mystery between the two men. Years later, her father has disappeared and the country is at war. Anna works at the Brooklyn Naval Yard, where women are allowed to hold jobs that once belonged to men, now soldiers abroad. She becomes the first female diver, the most dangerous and exclusive of occupations, repairing the ships that will help America win the war. One evening at a nightclub, she meets Dexter Styles again, and begins to understand the complexity of her father’s life, the reasons he might have vanished. “A magnificent achievement, at once a suspenseful noir intrigue and a transporting work of lyrical beauty and emotional heft” (The Boston Globe), “Egan’s first foray into historical fiction makes you forget you’re reading historical fiction at all” (Elle). Manhattan Beach takes us into a world populated by gangsters, sailors, divers, bankers, and union men in a dazzling, propulsive exploration of a transformative moment in the lives and identities of women and men, of America and the world.
Historical Fiction
World War 2
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More Details:
Author
Jennifer Egan
Pages
448
Publisher
Simon and Schuster
Published Date
2017-10-03
ISBN
150118377X 9781501183775
Community ReviewsSee all
"A young woman learns to be a diver for the war effort during World War 2."
Merry
"DNF 71%. Wanted to like this, found it slow and uninteresting. Then I suddenly realized I didn't care about these characters. Wikipedia tells me the ending. I'm done."
Diane Morello
"Abandoned about a fifth of the way through. Decided I hadn’t given it enough of a chance. Abandoned again at 35 percent."
Patty Hardwick
"3.5/4 stars"
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Lisa Francine
"I really enjoy all of Jennifer Egan's books and I was very excited for this one to be released as well. However, I found reading this novel to be a slog. It was quite slow and the characters lacked depth, to the point that I couldn't understand what their motivations were at times. Anna was, by far, the most compelling but we kept cutting away from her story to Dexter's and Ed's points of view, neither of which was very interesting. Dexter was a strange caricature of what a mobster should be while Ed just seemed to hate his crippled daughter so much he left his entire life behind to get away from her, which made it even harder for me to care about him at all. The portion of the book describing the shipwreck of his merchant boat was so tedious, I skimmed through most of it. <br/><br/>Anna and Dexter's love affair seems to come out of nowhere as well. Are we to believe that he was attracted to her when he met her as a 12 year old girl? Or that she was one of the only two women he ever cheated on his wife with because...what? She introduced herself to him at the club? I just didn't understand their chemistry at all. The culmination of their affair in a child is also nonsensical. There is no reason for it to happen. Anna is 19, she was doing well as a diver in Brooklyn, she did not need to go through this extra step in the last act of the book. Dexter had died, and she did not want to keep him in her life anymore so why did she even keep the baby? Because she thought she would never have anymore? Because she wanted it to be Lydia? It doesn't make sense at all. She was just saddled with a child that she didn't really want. Honestly, I don't really know what Anna wanted. Maybe I missed something? All I understood was that she wanted to dive and that she was good at it.<br/><br/>And when did we decide that Anna and Charlie Voss were best friends who couldn't lie to each other? I don't know if I forgot key elements of the book because it took me so long to read but I definitely don't understand how she loved him so much that she named her child after him in the end. So confused. <br/><br/>The book was well-researched and I commend Ms. Egan for that but I really did not enjoy this as much as I liked her other books. I would prefer logical character development over accuracy of period details. Many reviews in publications called this book a page-turner, but I don't know how they thought that. It took me a whole month to finally manage to get through it."
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Sarah Paracha
"I love her stuff"
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Ankita
"Honestly I only finished reading this book because I paid for it and you can’t return an ebook. <br/><br/>The story was slow at times, too quick at others. None of the characters were particularly likable and none of the side stories that the author spent so much time fit well into the main narrative. I’m not sure what the point of this book was even - it seems just a collection of disjointed short stories that was forced into one novel."
Lindsay Jocson
