"Much has changed in the feminist movement, and for all women... and this book observes those changes with a gimlet eye." —Time
"Finally, a novel about a complicated relationship that doesn’t get nearly enough attention: that between mentor and mentee. Full of Meg Wolitzer's signature acumen and insight." —Esquire
“A novel to get excited about.” —The Guardian
“An intricately woven and deeply layered story that follows women who connect, yearn, chase their ambitions, navigate structures of existing power while claiming their own, and who write their own stories—stories that ignite their imaginations and, sometimes, look vastly different from what they first planned.” —Southern Living
"This dazzling novel about embracing womanhood and ambition is a timely read." —The Chicago Review of Books
"Wolitzer tackles a litany of timely topics, from unwanted sexual advances to the underrepresentation of women in film to Gamergate-type abuse." —amNewYork
“Hurrah! Meg Wolitzer is back! And her new novel about feminism, female power, and mentorship is almost uncannily timely." —Chicago Reader
“Wolitzer is one of those rare novelists who is able to capture the zeitgeist… A master weaver of story lines.” —The Millions
“Ambitious and satisfying…This insightful and resonant novel explores what it is to both embrace womanhood and suffer because of it.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review
“Timely reading as circumstances revivify the fight for women’s rights.” —Library Journal
Praise for The Interestings:
“Remarkable . . . [The Interestings’s] inclusive vision and generous sweep place it among the ranks of books like Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom and Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Marriage Plot. The Interestings is warm, all-American, and acutely perceptive about the feelings and motivations of its characters, male and female, young and old, gay and straight; but it’s also stealthily, unassumingly, and undeniably a novel of ideas. . . . With this book [Wolitzer] has surpassed herself.” —The New York Times Book Review
“A victory . . . The Interestings secures Wolitzer’s place among the best novelists of her generation. . . . She’s every bit as literary as Franzen or Eugenides. But the very human moments in her work hit you harder than the big ideas. This isn’t women’s fiction. It’s everyone’s.” —Entertainment Weekly (A)
“The big questions asked by The Interestings are about what happened to the world (when, Jules wonders, did ‘analyst’ stop denoting Freud and start referring to finance?) and what happened to all that budding teenage talent. Might every privileged schoolchild have a bright future in dance or theater or glass blowing? Ms. Wolitzer hasn’t got the answers, but she does have her characters' mannerisms and attitudes down cold.” —The New York Times
“Wolitzer is almost crushingly insightful; she doesn’t just mine the contemporary mind, she seems to invade it.” —San Francisco Chronicle
“A sprawling, marvelously inventive novel . . . ambitious and enormously entertaining.” —The Washington Post
“A supremely engrossing, deeply knowing, genius-level enterprise . . . The novel is thick and thickly populated. And yet Wolitzer is brilliant at keeping the reader close by her side as she takes her story back and forth across time, in and out of multiple lives, and into the tangle of countless continuing, sometimes compromising, conversations.” —Chicago Tribune
“It’s a ritual of childhood—that solemn vow never to lose touch, no matter what. And for six artsy teenagers whose lives unfold in Wolitzer’s big-hearted, ambitious new novel, the vow holds for almost four decades.” —People
“[The Interestings] soars, primarily because Wolitzer insists on taking our teenage selves seriously and, rather than coldly satirizing them, comes at them with warm humor and adult wisdom.” —Elle
“In Meg Wolitzer’s lovely, wise The Interestings, Julie Jacobson begins the summer of ’74 as an outsider at arts camp until she is accepted into a clique of teenagers with whom she forms a lifelong bond. Through well-tuned drama and compassionate humor, Wolitzer chronicles the living organism that is friendship, and arcs it over the course of more than thirty years.” —O, The Oprah Magazine
“Wonderful.” —Vanity Fair
