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Title details for There's Going to Be Trouble by Jen Silverman - Available

There's Going to Be Trouble

A Novel

by Jen Silverman
Marin Ireland
Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
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A woman is pulled into a love affair with a radical activist, unknowingly echoing her family’s dangerous past and risking the foundations of her future in this electrifying novel.
“An exhilarating novel of star-crossed romances and radical politics, with writing so evocative I swear I could smell the tear gas.”—Nathan Hill, New York Times bestselling author of The Nix and Wellness
Minnow has always tried to lead the life her single father modeled—private, quiet, hardworking, apolitical. So she is rocked when an instinctive decision to help a student makes her the notorious public face of a scandal in the small town where she teaches. As tensions rise, death threats follow, and an overwhelmed Minnow flees to a teaching position in Paris. There, she falls into an exhilarating and all-consuming relationship with Charles, a young Frenchman whose activism has placed him at odds with his powerful family. As Minnow is pulled in to the daring protest Charles and his friends are planning, she unknowingly almost repeats a secret tragedy from her family’s past. Her father wasn’t always the restrained, conservative man he appears today. There are things he has taken great pains to conceal from his family and from the world.
In 1968, Keen is avoiding the Vietnam draft by pursuing a PhD at Harvard. He lives his life in the basement chemistry lab, studiously ignoring the news. But when he unexpectedly falls in love with Olya, a fiery community organizer, he is consumed by her world and loses sight of his own. Learning that his deferment has ended and he’s been drafted, Keen agrees to participate in the latest action that Olya is leading—one with more dangerous and far-reaching consequences than he could have imagined.
Minnow’s and Keen’s intertwining stories take us through the turmoil of the late sixties student movements and into the chaos of the modern world. Exploding with suspense, heart, and intelligence, There’s Going to Be Trouble is a story about revolution, legacy, passionate love, and how we live with the consequences of our darkest secrets.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    April 9, 2024

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9780593822616
      • File size: 315921 KB
      • Duration: 10:58:10

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Publisher's Weekly

      January 8, 2024
      The incisive if somewhat overstuffed latest from Silverman (We Play Ourselves) fuses two disparate narratives of contemporary Paris and 1960s Harvard with themes of protest and romance. In 2018, Minerva “Minnow” Hunter is fired from her high school teaching job in a tight-knit, conservative town, somewhere in the U.S., for reasons that are gradually revealed. She then moves to Paris, where she takes up a position in the English department of an unnamed university and falls in with the gilets jaunes protest movement against president Emmanuel Macron’s elitist policies. In a parallel narrative set in 1968, a grad student named Keen works at Harvard in a lab that makes napalm for U.S. forces in Vietnam. Each day, he and his colleagues listen to the shouts of protesters from outside their door. His eventual decision to join the protestors results in violent consequences. Silverman takes a lot on, and not all of it sticks. (The formulaic romance between Minnow and a French protester is a particular letdown: “The curve of his shoulder. The jut of his jaw.... She imagined him naked”). Still, Silverman manages to build suspense as they gradually connect the dots between the parallel stories. There’s plenty of intrigue bubbling beneath the surface of this surprisingly complex novel. Agent: Allison Hunter, Trellis Literary. (Apr.)Correction: An earlier version of this review used the wrong pronoun to refer to the author.

    • Library Journal

      July 1, 2024

      Playwright, poet, and novelist Silverman's (We Play Ourselves) latest is a dual-timeline novel set in 2018 and 1968. In 2018, Minnow takes a job abroad in Paris, running from a small-town scandal and looking for a fresh start. She starts an affair with a younger professor entrenched in the Yellow Vest (Gilet Jaune) movement, a populist group protesting income inequality and seeking economic justice. Unbeknownst to Minnow, she is living out a story similar to that of her father, Keen. In the novel's 1968 timeline, Keen, a Harvard graduate student, falls for Minnow's mother, an activist involved in volatile protests against the Vietnam War. Narrator Marin Ireland ably navigates the book's interwoven timelines, offering a smooth, engaging performance. Ireland keeps the tension high; though listeners may predict the ending to Keen's plotline, they'll be anxious to learn how Minnow's story resolves. VERDICT A well-plotted, character-driven novel that thrusts listeners into the emotionally fraught landscape of antiwar and antiestablishment protests. The dual star-crossed lovers add another level of enjoyment, making this a solid recommendation for listeners seeking literary fiction blended with politics, romance, and intrigue.--Jessica Caniglia

      Copyright 2024 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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