Worth the effort

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jamie Avatar

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To be honest, The Latecomer was a bit of a struggle at first. The story develops very slowly and a lot of the characters are hard to like, which makes a book that much harder to get in to. At times, Jean Hanff Korelitz writes as though her best friend is a thesaurus, substituting words that are commonly used for the most obscure synonyms she can find. After the first 100 or so pages, though, I was (finally) hooked.

It’s the story of triplets born via IVF when IVF was still rare or new. Their mom, Johanna, assumed and, almost, NEEDED her babies to have that almost magical bond that children in a multiple birth are often assumed to have. As the triplets grew, they grew apart until, by college, they were actively denying the others existed. Meanwhile, to ward off the empty nest when all 3 little birdies fly off to college at once, Johanna and her husband, Salo, decide to thaw the last embryo and hope that baby is the glue that holds the family together.

The plot was good, if slow. Each chapter was about a different character so it could get a bit confusing or frustrating when the chapter ended and you wanted to follow up with what was happening in the moment. I liked the subtitles to each chapter that hinted a bit at what was to unfold in its pages