The Spectacular, Zoe Whittall
The Spectacular, Zoe Whittall
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The Spectacular

Author: Zoe Whittall

Narrator: Hillary Huber, Helen Lloyd, Alex McKenna

Unabridged: 11 hr 54 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 09/14/2021


Synopsis

Three generations of women strive for real freedom in this startling, provocative novel exploring sexuality, gender, and maternal ambivalence, from the acclaimed author of The Best Kind of People.

“In the best books, characters feel like my friends, but with the mothers of The Spectacular, they came to feel like my family.”—Torrey Peters, author of Detransition, Baby

It’s 1997 and Missy is a cellist in an indie rock band on tour across America. At twenty-two years old, she gets on stage every night and plays the song about her absent mother that made the band famous. As the only girl in the band, she’s determined to party just as hard as everyone else, loving and leaving a guy in every town. But then she meets a tomboy drummer who is hard to forget, and a forgotten flap of cocaine strands her at the border.

Fortysomething Carola is just surfacing from a sex scandal at the yoga center where she has been living when she sees her daughter, Missy, for the first time in ten years—on the cover of a music magazine.

Ruth is eighty-three and planning her return to the Turkish seaside village where she spent her childhood. But when her granddaughter, Missy, winds up crashing at her house, she decides it’s time that the strong and stubborn women in her family find a way to understand one another again.

In this sharply observed novel, Zoe Whittall captures three very different women who each struggle to build an authentic life. Definitions of family, romance, gender, and love will radically change as they seek out lives that are nothing less than spectacular.

About Zoe Whittall

ZOE WHITTALL is the author of five novels, including the recent bestseller The Fake, which was longlisted for the Toronto Book Award. The New York Times called her fourth novel The Spectacular, â€œa highly readable testament to the strength of the maternal bond.” Her third novel The Best Kind of People was shortlisted for The Scotiabank-Giller Prize. Her second novel Holding Still for as Long as Possible won a Lambda Award, and was an American Library Association’s Stonewall Honor Book. Her debut novel Bottle Rocket Hearts won the Writers’ Trust of Canada’s Dayne Ogilvie prize. She is also a Canadian Screen Award winning TV writer. She lives in Prince Edward County.  


Reviews

Goodreads review by Carrie on July 15, 2022

The Spectacular by Zoe Whittall is a women’s fiction novel featuring three generations of women. The story in The Spectacular is one that is told by changing the point of view between the characters and by changing timelines going back to the past and also a jump further into the future from the cur......more

Goodreads review by Bandit on July 02, 2021

Spectacular presupposes its own expectations. It would be hugely ironic and quite sad for the novel with a title like that to turn out to be a middling mediocrity. And sure enough, it begins spectacularly…boldly, excitingly, it promises all the spectacular things, poised on a brink of awesomeness li......more

Goodreads review by BookOfCinz on April 16, 2023

Motherhood is a mental illness -Ramona from the movie Hustlers The book opens with twenty-two years old Missy, who is a cellist in an indie rock band that is about to go on Tour, wanting to get her tubes tied. She wants to have the freedom of going on tour without having to worry about getting pre......more

Goodreads review by Maria on August 22, 2021

Thank you Harper Collins Canada for an ARC in exchange for an honest review! I couldn’t put this novel down, it was just compulsively readable and so engrossing, pulling you in different directions. What starts out as a kick-ass novel ends in a different kind of kick-ass life. This book is told with......more

Goodreads review by Geonn on July 21, 2021

3.5 rounded up, because I really wish I'd liked this a lot more than I ended up liking it. It starts very strong, and I loved the Missy chapters, but by the end I was just kind of... I don't know, the steam ran out and I didn't really care about anyone as much as I had at the beginning. The exciteme......more


Quotes

“Whittall’s knockout novel is a multigenerational riot of grrrlhood and womanhood, a brisk and wistful tour through the ambivalence of responsibility.”Oprah Daily
 
The Spectacular is an homage to womanhood, motherhood, sexuality, and queerness as it chronicles the lives of three ferociously strong protagonists who are wildly different from one another.”Associated Press

“Zoe Whittall’s taut novel The Spectacular has all the trappings to become the season’s dishiest read. It’s also a gem of literary fiction. . . . In Whittall’s smart and capable hands, these unconventional women are given the space to experience their full, complicated lives.”—BookPage

“An occasionally melancholy often darkly comedic story from a sharply talented writer, The Spectacular is a vibrant homage to living life on your own terms.”—PureWow

“Whittall addresses motherhood and autonomy in ways I’ve never seen done before. A fascinating stunner of a novel, The Spectacular is exactly that: spectacular!”—Kristen Arnett, author of With Teeth

“This book will leave you with a brilliant roar inside your chest—Whittall’s prose is afire with the most complex and daring forms of empathy.”—Alissa Nutting, author of Made for Love

“Just imagine this book dog-eared, spine-cracked, pages limp from use, living by your bedside—because from the moment you open The Spectacular, you’ll happily succumb to a totally absorbing contemporary epic with characters and social worlds that are Edith Wharton–level dimensional but as relatable as your own uncannily recognizable self.”—Jordy Rosenberg, author of Confessions of the Fox

“This is a novel about how we learn to define who we are, about the courage to make decisions nobody will understand, and about the profound complexities of maternal ambivalence. Both expansive and intimate, wild and tender, I loved it.”—Ashley Audrain, author of The Push

“A daring and beautiful examination of motherhood, The Spectacular left me breathless.”—Robin Wasserman, author of Mother Daughter Widow Wife

“Both raw and refined, The Spectacular is an insightful, poignant exploration of family and relationships from one of my favorite writers working today. A multigenerational story that’s fully alive.”—Iain Reid, author of I’m Thinking of Ending Things

“Fearless, challenging, epic—these are all words I have been using to describe The Spectacular. Fiction often teaches us truths, and The Spectacular does just that, laying bare the ways in which women are defined and the ways in which women can define themselves.”—Jen Sookfong Lee, author of The Conjoined