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It's the summer of 1982 in Blacksburg, Virginia - seven years after the suspicious death of a son and sibling - and the Sobel family is hungry.
Francie dresses in tennis skirts and ankle socks and weighs her grams of allotted carrots and iceberg lettuce. Her semi-estranged husband Tate prefers a packed fridge and hidden doughnuts. Daughters Enid, ten, and Vivvy, almost thirteen, are subtler versions of their parents, measuring their summer vacation by meals had or meals skipped. But at summer's end, secrets both old and new emerge and Francie disappears, leaving the family teetering on the brink.
Told from alternating points of view by the four living Sobels, Pretend We Are Lovely is a sharp and darkly funny story of forgiveness, family secrets, and the losses we inherit. At its core is the ever-complicated and deeply-devoted bond of sisterhood as the girls, left mostly to their own devices, must navigate their way through middle school, find comfort in each other, and learn the difference between food and nourishment.
"Starred Review. In prose that ambulates between stark, hallucinatory, fuddled, and chewy according to the guiding character's point of view, Reid masterfully denies her novel the impulse to solve its characters' problems, leaving the reader with the brutal task of lingering within their experience." - Kirkus
"A tense, vivid, and sharp novel that captures the complex relationships between the Sobel family members, particularly between sisters Vivvy and Enid." - Publishers Weekly
"Like the best love songs, Noley Reid's novel is sad but hopeful, raw but tender, shocking but, ultimately, deeply comforting." - Julia Fierro, author of Cutting Teeth and The Gypsy Moth Summer
"Reid writes potently of our most intimate blind spots: the tangles of love and bodies, nourishment and punishment, grief and comfort. In her agile hands the complexity of family is dramatically and vitally revealed." - Samantha Hunt, author of Mr. Splitfoot
"In Pretend We Are Lovely, Noley Reid captures what it is to have to be a parent while still a child and does so in the most true and perfect way. Even more magically, she captures the reverse, calling on the children inside us with so much empathy that we come away able to laugh at the pain that makes us wise." - Tupelo Hassman, author of Girlchild
"[A] book fat with love, full of tender absurdity and absurd tenderness, a story that artfully depicts the first aches and thrills of adolescence while also unmasking the unslakable thirst that slips with us into adulthood." - Alethea Black, author of I Knew You'd Be Lovely
"[A] novel that will make you laugh and also break your heart in all the right ways ... Told with wit and charm and compassion, this novel resonates with all that we hunger to have and all that feeds us." - Lee Martin, author of The Bright Forever
This information about Pretend We Are Lovely was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
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