The Raising: A Novel

This book started off slow, and I wanted to like it a lot more than I ultimately did. The novel shows a lot of initial promise, and I'd hoped it would develop into something that made sticking with it through the beginning worthwhile. For a few chapters, it seemed like it would, but ultimately it fell very flat. The characters are mostly archetypal with little real personality of their own, which made developing sympathy (and thus, investment in their fortunes) for any of them challenging, and I ended up feeling a strangely uncomfortable sense that the author strongly disliked the demographics of young people and career women that she chose as her primary subjects. A lugubrious and improbable plot that stretched my suspension too far ended in the kind of anti-resolutions that I feel many more mainstream/lit-type authors find themselves falling into. As if they see themselves as "taking on" "genre tropes" in order to "elevate them" and get too focused on making statements of one kind or another, maybe about life, maybe about storytelling, but miss the mark a bit on both. There's a variety of really interesting ideas in here, but at the end of the day (and the often-tedious 18 hours of listening) I wished the author had offered the same degree of respect and interest in all of what she chose to write about as the few subjects that really shone through as having been thoughtfully researched and integrated.