Kings County
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
A Brooklyn love story, set to music: Kings County “crystallizes how it feels to be young and in love in New York City” (Stephanie Danler).
It’s the early 2000s and like generations of ambitious young people before her, Audrey Benton arrives in New York City on a bus from nowhere. Broke but resourceful, she soon finds a home for herself amid the burgeoning music scene in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. But the city’s freedom comes with risks, and Audrey makes compromises to survive. As she becomes a minor celebrity in indie rock circles, she finds an unlikely match in Theo Gorski, a shy but idealistic mill-town kid who’s struggling to establish himself in the still-patrician world of books. But then an old acquaintance of Audrey’s disappears under mysterious circumstances, sparking a series of escalating crises that force the couple to confront a dangerous secret from her past.
From the raucous heights of Occupy Wall Street to the comical lows of the publishing industry, from million-dollar art auctions to Bushwick drug dens, Kings County captures New York City at a moment of cultural reckoning. Grappling with the resonant issues and themes of our time—sex and violence, art and commerce, friendship and family—it is an epic coming-of-age tale about love, consequences, bravery, and fighting for one’s place in an ever-changing world.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Goodwillie (American Subversive) dully resurrects the New York City of the recent past, when Occupy Wall Street occupied the headlines, fixtures such as Caf Loup catered to Manhattan cognoscenti, and the Turkey's Nest dive bar welcomed Brooklyn's newest hipsters. Among these are Audrey Benton, a failed actor who babysits bands for a Brooklyn music label, and Theo Gorski, a book editor turned literary scout for films, both of whom arrived as recent college graduates shortly after 9/11. In 2011, after dating for three years, Audrey and Theo hit a series of bumps when one of Audrey's friends, Fender, disappears. Audrey's Bushwick apartment is then broken into and someone leaves behind a note with four names on it Audrey and her three best friends, including Fender, whose name has a check mark next to it. Audrey's confession of a sordid secret from her past causes a rift between her and Theo, who separately try to find out who is behind the threat. It takes Goodwillie until the halfway point to introduce the mystery element, but even then, thrills are strangely absent, and Theo's casual sociology falls flat ("He was not politically active, but he was a watcher of the world, and the Occupy movement intrigued him"). Despite an attempt at Wolfean verisimilitude, this slipshod novel reads more like a Wienie Roast of the Vanities.
