The Awkward Age
Francesca Segal, 2017
Penguin Publishing
368 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780399576454
Summary
They've chosen the one thing that will make our family life impossible. It's genius really, when you think about it. It's the perfect sabotage.
Julia Alden has fallen deeply, unexpectedly in love. American obstetrician James is everything she didn't know she wanted—if only her teenage daughter, Gwen, didn't hate him so much.
Uniting two households is never easy, but when Gwen turns for comfort to James's seventeen-year-old son, Nathan, the consequences will test her mother's loyalty and threaten all their fragile new happiness.
This is a moving and powerful novel about the modern family: about starting over; about love, guilt, and generosity; about building something beautiful amid the mess and complexity of what came before.
It is a story about standing by the ones we love, even while they make mistakes. We would give anything to make our children happy. But how much should they ask? (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1980
• Where—London, England, UK
• Education—Oxford University
• Awards—Costa First Novel Award (more below)
• Currently—lives in London, England
Francesca Segal is a British writer and author of two well regarded novels, The Innocents (2012) and The Awkward Age (2017). She is one of two daughters of Erich Segal, most widely known as the author of Love Story, the bestseller novel turned blockbuster movie staring Ali McGraw and Ryan O'Neal.
Born in London, Francesca was brought up between the UK and America, where her father taught Greek and Latin at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton Universities. She returned to England to take her degree at St Hugh’s College, Oxford.
Since then, Segal has worked as a journalist and author. Her work has appeared in Granta, The Guardian, and Vogue (both UK and US), among others. She has been a features writer at Tatler, and for three years wrote the Debut Fiction column in The Observer.
Awards
For her first novel, The Innocents, Segal received the Costa First Novel Award, the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction, the Sami Rohr Prize, and a Betty Trask Award. She was also long-listed for the Bailey's Women's Prize for Fiction (formerly the Orange Prize). Segal lives in London. (Adapted from the publisher and Wikipedia. Retrieved on 5/25/2017.)
Book Reviews
A great premise for a novel, and Segal handles it expertly.… [E]veryday family interactions—the deep, primal resentments played out over a bowl of porridge, or a shopping list—are observed warmly and yet with hawk-like precision.
Guardian (UK)
In Francesca Segal’s magnificent new novel The Awkward Age, romantic and parental love go head to head, stress-testing loyalties and bonds with heartbreaking consequences.… [A] narrative that’s never anything less than gripping.
Independent (UK)
[Explores] themes of non-nuclear family life, the everyday fractures and renovations inherent to relationships of any kind, amid moments of pitch-perfect comic tension.… Segal anticipates every care, concern and anxiety of an all-too-real cast: the complexities of parenthood and the differing methods of trying to prepare children for the world.
Financial Times (UK)
Segal is a sharp observer of the tribulations of teenage love and modern relationships.… [T]his book is a lively, quick-witted performance.
Sunday Times (UK)
Segal’s elegant second novel is an entertaining look at the messy business of trying to be a family in emotionally trying circumstances.… egal gives each [character] a chance to tell their side of the story in gossipy detail, revealing petty jealousies, self-interested justifications, wounded pride and sweet affection. Irresistible.
Mail on Sunday (UK)
Segal deftly unspools a disastrous but plausible scenario for [a] struggling new family, raising big questions about loyalty, love, and the dynamics between parents and child. Not to mention lovers: What do you do if you think your soulmate has raised a brat? This page-turner is witty, compassionate and wickedly astute.
People
Awkward is a perfect descriptor for this page-turning novel about an adult couple whose respective children from previous marriages unexpectedly strike up a romance in the midst of merging households.
InStyle
If you're craving drama, this book is for you!
Bustle
This observant comedy of manners about a contemporary blended family by the author of The Innocents is deepened by the author’s compassion for her self-deluded characters.… If adolescence is “fraught with awkwardness,” Segal ably demonstrates that adulthood is as well.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) Love and romance in all their difficult, volatile combinations have no limits in this multigenerational dissection of the eternal conundrum of life: what brings us together can tear us apart.… [A] novel that surprises until the very end. —Beth Andersen, formerly with Ann Arbor Dist. Lib., MI
Library Journal
(Starred review.) Readers who enjoyed…the works of Meg Wolitzer and Matthew Norman will adore this frank and unfiltered glimpse inside one family’s struggles and successes.
Booklist
(Starred review.) There are no clear answers here.… In finely wrought prose, with characters who seem to walk beside us and speak aloud, Segal's latest novel is a sympathetic portrait of the difficulties in finding love and raising teenagers.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, use our LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for The Awkward Age…then take off on your own:
1. The big question in this novel is what do parents owe their children? How much should they sacrifice of their own happiness to keep their children happy?
2. Describe the civil war in the Alden-Fuller household. Who despises whom...and why?
3. Do your sympathies lie with any one in particular? Whom do you find more at fault—or perhaps less at fault—than the others? Or are they all equally to blame? Does the shift in perspective—allowing you to go inside each character's mind—make a difference in how you view them?
4. When Julia finds out about Gwen and Nathan, she is enraged. But her daughter stubbornly refuses to put her mother's needs first, pointing out that Julia had not put her needs first. Where do you stand in this argument?
5. Talk about that mother-daughter relationship. Julia considers Gwen as "her body's work: to shield this chld from harm, lifelong." Also, the two are like "hostages long held together" but now giving way to a widening "gulf" between them. As a parent or a child, can you relate to their confusion, anger, and pain?
6. Trace how the characters change over the course of the novel. Julia, for instance, "knew life to be a series of calamities," while James is an optimist. What happens to their outlooks? How do the characters mature or attain a new level of understanding? Or…perhaps they don't.
7. Discuss the significance of the title: "The Awkward Age." Is it ironic…or descriptive? While the phrase usually refers to adolescence, how might it relate to adulthood?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)