Clasp (Crosley) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
[A] shrewd exploration of the modern-day late-quarter-life crisis, disguised as a caper…[Crosley's] signature wit is sharp as ever here. She is startlingly good at portraying comically awful characters who would seem cartoonish if they weren't also so recognizable…Crosley is an incisive observer of human nature in general and of a generation in particular—people circling the age of 30 who foster undue fondness for the retro culture of their youth…For all its humor, Crosley's prose is equally sharp in delineating her characters' despair…in this highly comic, highly affecting novel.
Julia Pierpont - New York Times Book Review


[The Clasp is] a love-triangle-comedy-of-manners told in Crosley’s signature irreverent style.
Washington Post


Crosley has achieved a rare feat: a complex and clever work of homage that deepens the original by connecting it to contemporary life. The Clasp is a gentle, astute, funny, smart, and very entertaining book.
Julia Holme - New Republic


Crosley is best known for her comic essays, some of which were collected in I Was Told There’d Be Cake, but her gifts–keen observation, mordant humor, an affinity for the bittersweet–translate surprisingly seamlessly into fiction.
Lev Grossman - Time


Crosley, with her quirky cleverness, seems more in league with the doohickeys of the world than with the emeralds. She’s interested not so much in transcendent beauty as in the small gears that hold people together and sometimes force them apart; when the objects you cherish could easily turn out to be fake, what matters is not what you cling to but the fact that you cling to it.... Crosley’s stylishness as a writer never tips over into shtickiness or stifles her warmth—it only makes the flowering of genuine emotion more powerful .
Katy Waldman - Slate


A novel with more verve and imagination than much of the plot-light fare that typically gets the high-literary treatment, a story that shares at least some DNA with ambitious capers like Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch and Marisha Pessl’s Special Topics in Calamity Physics.
Vogue


Those who love Crosley's essays for the way they straddle the line between slapstick humor and essential truths will love her fiction too. Each sentence builds upon the last, toward one big wink: Isn't life weird? And isn't that great?
Elle


With mordant wit and an ear for millennial patois, Crosley dissects the pretensions of Los Angeles and New York, then sends her characters to France on a madcap adventure. It's fun to tag along.
People


[A] mix of smarts and sarcasm to commemorate some of life’s more mortifying moment.... Victor’s harebrained attempts at tracking the necklace down, culminating in a French chateau break-in with a mildly concerned Kezia and Nathaniel in hot pursuit, make not only for fun reading but hint at the surprisingly poignant extent of just how far old acquaintances will go to save one another’s hides.
Publishers Weekly


This is not Crosley's first book;.... But it is her first novel. While attending a college friend's splashy wedding, twentysomethings...learn about a valuable necklace that vanished in Nazi-occupied France, and they're off on a crazy chase that leads them to the estate of Guy de Maupassant, beloved for his classic short story "The Necklace."
Library Journal


Crosley is an innate storyteller and writes with her signature wit and flair.... The Clasp speaks to flaws in humanity and friendships in a charming and realistic way. This novel entertains even as it provokes internal examination of one’s own relationships.
BookPage


Crosley, of the smart, humorous essay collections I Was Told There'd Be Cake (2008) and How Did You Get This Number? (2010) writes her three-dimensional characters' thoughts and dialogue with a clever crispness her fans would hope for, and she further stuns with a mastery of her first novel's setting and frame: a lavish Florida wedding, a crotchety Parisian jewelry designer's offices, a drive through enchanting-and disturbing-provincial France.
Booklist


[A] quest to find a priceless necklace and regain an even rarer treasure: a genuine connection. [T]renchant.... [A]n interconnected circle of friends from college who, like beads on a broken necklace, have dispersed and rolled off on different paths.... [S]mart, sardonic, sometimes-zany, yet also sensitive.... A real gem.
Kirkus Reviews