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“In the best books, characters feel like my friends, but with the mothers of The Spectacular, they came to feel like my family.”—Torrey Peters, author of Detransition, Baby
It’s 1997 and Missy is a cellist in an indie rock band on tour across America. At twenty-two 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.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
September 14, 2021 -
Formats
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OverDrive Listen audiobook
- ISBN: 9780593210888
- File size: 342972 KB
- Duration: 11:54:31
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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Hillary Huber and Alex McKenna give outstanding performances as an estranged mother-daughter duo in this quiet family drama. Helen Lloyd vividly portrays the mother's mother. McKenna voices Missy, who, after growing up on a Vermont commune, becomes a successful rock musician. Much of the audiobook takes place while Missy is touring in her 20s, and McKenna sounds exactly like a sometimes-wild young woman--loud and brash. Her narration heightens Missy's emotions. Huber voices Missy's mother, Carola, who left Missy as a child, and is now living at a rural retreat center. Her low, even voice is calm, assured, tinged with wisdom and sorrow. As Missy ages, pondering motherhood herself, McKenna's voice changes--sounding more like Huber's. It's a poignant and powerful meditation on aging, womanhood, family-making, and forgiveness. L.S. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine
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