The Nest, a novel by Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney is a book about people. A family, the Plumb family, to be exact, and their relationships and nuances. The story follows four siblings, Leo, Jack, Melody, and Bea as they grapple with their past, present, and looming futures. Leo is the infamously improvident one in the family and proves this within the first few pages by luring a young waitress working his cousin’s wedding to his car for inappropriate reasons, then crashing the car, severely injuring the young woman. Having caused such an expensive accident, Leo is given money from The Nest, a healthy sum of money kept in a fund by the Plumbs’ parents, to pay for everything. The Nest was supposed to be divided equally between the four adults once Melody, the youngest of them, turned forty years old. Sure enough, the rest of Leo’s siblings are upset because each of them has their own financial problems that could totally be solved with a share of The Nest, but here was Leo, getting all his problems paid away while the three younger siblings are living with just enough. Jack, second eldest and most bitter with his family, owns an antique shop that hardly gives any income, all the while borrowing against a nice cottage he owns with his husband. Bea is an author, or was, in everybody’s eyes; she’s hardly written anything in years. Melody is the youngest and most reliant on any money that could come from the fund. She has two teenage daughters, Louisa and Nora, who she firmly believes must go to the best (and most expensive) schools for college, although she hides the fact that there is absolutely no money to do so. Leo promises to pay back what he was given from The Nest, but the siblings are skeptical, because since when has Leo ever kept his promises? Despite this, Jack, Melody, and Bea are still dependent on The Nest and believe that they can get the life they’d always wanted with the handsome amount of money. The siblings are both drawn together and pulled apart, but stuck through it all at the end like taffy, although the ending wasn’t ideal.
I think The Nest was an okay book. There are several good qualities about it, but I wasn’t all that motivated to read it. One thing I really enjoyed were the numerous perspectives and the individual voices of the characters. This book does a great job of tying every person to each other, showing the connectedness of family and community. There are multiple side characters and plotlines that I haven’t mentioned because they don’t add a lot to the plot, but they do enhance the sense that these characters are real with a life and relationships. And while this novel is fantastic at showing the complexities of human nature, I think this book was a bit too complex regarding the financial aspects. I think this book is targeted towards older people because the main characters are adults who actually know what “borrowing against” means and stuff about the stock market and all that jazz. I don’t, and the book does talk a lot about financial stuff, especially at the beginning, which made me feel kind of disinterested by the story. The thing that made me want to continue reading The Nest (besides my obligation to complete this assignment) was the supporting characters’ stories. It’d be pretty boring if the book was just about some sad middle aged adults, so I suppose that’s why the author wrote about other characters. One of them was Matilda Rodriguez, who was the waitress Leo had injured. I like that the narrative showed the viewpoint of the victim rather than focus on the perpetrator and shows how Leo’s actions impacted a young woman's life. We get to see Matilda recover and make friends and eventually be at peace with her life. Another interesting side story was about Louisa and Nora, Melody’s twins. The story follows the twins hiding their adventures from their overprotective mother who thinks they’re at SAT tutoring. The twins’ story develops with Simone, another student studying at the tutoring center, befriending the twins and eventually becoming Nora’s lover. This story does a great job at showing how control breeds secrecy and how secrecy leads to fear. The negative thing about this story is that it shows underaged people having intimate moments in public spaces, which I find weird because 1.) they’re underage, 2.) they’re in public, and 3.) the intimate moments are particularly descriptive. This book has plenty of sexual themes, but this one felt inappropriate and rather out of place.
On the whole, this book is pretty good. It’s interesting enough to have been read for two hundred pages, but there are some things that I didn’t like about it. I would advise mature students or adults to read it, because otherwise it can be a bit confusing and concerning.
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