Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Mar 2024
304 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
Frances Ha meets No One Is Talking About This in a debut that follows two siblings-turned-roommates navigating an absurd world on the verge of calamity—a Seinfeldian novel of existentialism and sisterhood.
It's March of 2019, and twenty-eight-year-old Jules Gold—anxious, artistically frustrated, and internet-obsessed—has been living alone in the apartment she once shared with the man she thought she'd marry when her younger sister Poppy comes to crash. Indefinitely. Poppy, a year and a half out from a suicide attempt only Jules knows about, searches for work and meaning in Brooklyn while Jules spends her days hate-scrolling the feeds of Mormon mommy bloggers and waiting for life to happen.
Then the hives that've plagued Poppy since childhood flare up. Jules's uterus turns against her. Poppy brings home a maladjusted rescue dog named Amy Klobuchar. The girls' mother, a newly devout Messianic Jew, starts falling for the same deep-state conspiracy theories as Jules's online mommies. Jules, halfheartedly struggling to scrape her way to the source of her ennui, slowly and cruelly comes to blame Poppy for her own insufficiencies as a friend, a writer, and a sister. And Amy Klobuchar might have rabies. As the year shambles on and a new decade looms near, a disastrous trip home to Florida forces Jules and Poppy—comrades, competitors, constant fixtures in each other's lives—to ask themselves what they want their futures to look like, and whether they'll spend them together or apart.
Deadpan, dark, and brutally funny, Worry is a sharp portrait of two sisters enduring a dread-filled American moment from a nervy new voice in contemporary fiction.
"[A] mordant debut ... comical and savage... With unflinching honesty, Tanner captures the claustrophobia of 21st-century young adulthood." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"A dark millennial comedy starring testy, needy Floridian Jewish sisters who move in together in New York City and drive each other nuts... . The kind of book you will constantly be reading out loud to others... . This hilarious, unremittingly jaundiced depiction of modern young adulthood hits rare extremes of both funny and sad." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Heart-piercing...Fans of Jen Beagin and Melissa Broder will appreciate Tanner's style and her ability to realistically and heartrendingly introduce a character's debilitating sadness as well as her three-legged dog named Amy Klobuchar....A stinging yet joyful story about life playing out online or nowhere and the family we can't stand and can't stand the thought of losing, which can also mean ourselves." —Booklist
"Worry is exacting and hilarious, the startling, familiar shock of seeing your own slightly warped face reflected back to you when your iPhone dies from hours of scrolling. I haven't shut up about this book and I don't think I will for the foreseeable future." —NYLON
"The voice! The tone! The humor! Tanner woos with wonderful writing from the first to the last page. [Worry] follows two twenty-something siblings in a darkly funny existential crisis. Tanner deftly explores adult sibling friendship like I've never seen on the page. It could very well be the Great Millennial Novel." —Debutiful, Most Anticipated Books of 2024
"What a biting and brilliant novel. I couldn't put it down. Worry writes toward truth in the time of the internet, it uncovers the absolute horror of 'buying things,' and it does what novels are meant to do: hauntingly display the dark and familiar sides of human behavior. Worry is the best thing I've read in a very long time." —Kiley Reid, New York Times bestselling author of Such a Fun Age and Come and Get It
"Worry is an excellent, excellent comic novel, a proper laugh-until-you-cough onslaught of horrible manners, toxic relatives, internet vomit, and hilariously maimed pets. I've spent my whole life desperately trying not to say the stuff that comes out of these characters' mouths. A book that's impossible to read without annoying your friends with constant quotations. But who needs friends when you've got this book?" —Tony Tulathimutte, author of Private Citizens
This information about Worry 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.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Alexandra Tanner is a Brooklyn-based writer and editor. She is a graduate of the MFA program at The New School and the recipient of fellowships from MacDowell and The Center for Fiction. Her writing appears in The New York Times Book Review, Gawker, and Jewish Currents, among other outlets. Worry is her first novel.
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