Ask Me Again
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
From Clare Sestanovich, the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize nominee whose short stories received instant acclaim, a debut novel about a young woman’s coming of age, in parallel with a renegade male friend who challenges her beliefs and the course of her life.
Eva meets Jamie by chance. She is sixteen, living in middle-class Brooklyn; he is the same age, but from the super-rich of upper Manhattan. She’s observant, cautious, eager to seem normal; he’s bold, mysterious, eccentric. Eva’s family is warm and welcoming, but Jamie avoids going home to his. Despite having little in common, they instantly forge a deep friendship.
As Eva goes off to college and falls in and out of love, Jamie drops out of school and is drawn toward radical experiments in politics and religion. Their separate spheres seem to be spiralling away from each other, but it soon becomes clear that they are both circling the same question: how do you define yourself and your beliefs in a divided and unjust world?
Written with precision and immense wit, Ask Me Again is a journey of intimacy across time. A love story of sorts, this coming-of-age novel explores how relationships can define us, change us and point us towards futures we might not have imagined for ourselves.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Sestanovich's leisurely debut novel (after the collection Objects of Desire) traces the divergent paths of two friends from different socioeconomic strata. After college, middle-class Brooklynite Eva moves to Washington, D.C., where she hopes her "boring internship at an exciting newspaper" will lead to a real job. Though she's eventually hired as a researcher, her tasks remain rote and unsatisfying. In D.C., she reconnects and begins sleeping with her ambitious college boyfriend, Eli, but is similarly bored by details of his work for a U.S. senator. Eva's story plays out in counterpoint to that of her wealthy Upper East Side friend Jamie, who embraces the Occupy movement during college, refuses to accept money from his family, and joins a cult-like church in Brooklyn. By the end of the novel, Jamie's well-meaning desire for community, which drives him to purchase an abandoned warehouse where he illegally houses artists, leads to disaster. While readers hungry for plot and resolution may be left unsatisfied, Sestanovich captivates with her distinctive characterizations—including of Eva's parents, who offer Jamie financial support and show more interest in him than their daughter—and insights into the reverberating consequences of a gap between one's intentions and one's actions. The result is an intelligent exploration of lives in the making.
