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Book Summary and Reviews of The World After Alice by Lauren Aliza Green

The World After Alice by Lauren Aliza Green

The World After Alice

A Novel

by Lauren Aliza Green

  • Readers' Rating (1):
  • Published:
  • Jul 2024, 320 pages
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About this book

Book Summary

For readers of Seating Arrangements and The Most Fun We Ever Had, a gorgeous and gripping story of two families brought together to celebrate an unexpected marriage, twelve years after a devastating tragedy upended their lives.

When Morgan and Benji surprise their families with a wedding invitation to Maine, they're aware the news of their clandestine relationship will come as a shock. Twelve years have passed since the stunning loss of sixteen-year-old Alice, Benji's sister and Morgan's best friend, and no one is quite the same. But the young couple decide to plunge headlong into matrimony, marking the first time their fractured families will reunite since Alice's funeral.

As the arriving guests descend upon the tranquil coastal town, they bring with them not only skepticism about the impromptu nuptials but also deep-seated secrets and agendas of their own. Peter, Morgan's father, may be trying to dissuade his daughter from saying "I do," while Linnie, Benji's mother, introduces a boyfriend who bears a tumultuous past of his own. Nick, Benji's father, is scheming to secure a new job before his wife—formerly his mistress—discovers he's lost his old one. Morgan, too, carries delicate secrets that threaten to jeopardize the happiness for which she has so longed. And as for Benji—well, he's just trying to make sure the whole weekend doesn't implode.

As the whirlwind weekend unfolds, old passions reignite, deep wounds resurface, and unearthed secrets threaten to shatter the fragile peace the wedding promises. With each new revelation, the to-be-weds and their complicated families are forced to question just how well they know the ones they hold dear.

Please be aware that this discussion guide will contain spoilers!
  1. Morgan and Alice's friendship was as close as it was consuming and competitive, built on an addictive relativity. What do you think bound them together, and what do you think created distance between them? Have you ever had a friendship like this?
  2. Many of the characters in The World After Alice are grappling with what it means to be exceptional—as a parent, as a spouse, as well as artistically, intellectually, and professionally. How do they manage these pressures in the novel, and how do you see it affecting their relationships? Is this something you struggle with in your own life?
  3. The characters in the novel are each privately implicated in Alice's death, and have been living with the guilt and grief for years. ...
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Reviews

Media Reviews

"The World After Alice is a lovely debut novel that glimmers with fine writing and notes of human insight. There's a quiet beauty to Lauren Aliza Green's work, and I am now a fan." —Ann Napolitano, New York Times bestselling author of Hello Beautiful

"The World After Alice is a study of grief, resilience, and surprising joy in the face of incomprehensible loss. I know these characters will stay with me." —Mary Beth Keane, New York Times bestselling author of Ask Again, Yes and The Half Moon

"A page-turner of a family drama. The World After Alice is at turns brutally honest, funny, and deeply empathic." —Charmaine Wilkerson, New York Times bestselling author of Black Cake

This information about The World After Alice 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.

Reader Reviews

Write your own reviewwrite your own review

Cloggie Downunder

A worthy debut
3.5?s
The World After Alice is the first novel by Lauren Aliza Green. On an icy February night, twelve years ago, sixteen-year-old Alce Weil went missing. CCTV from a nearby store showed that she stepped off the George Washington Bridge into the Hudson River. No trace of her was ever found. After the tragedy, her parents’ marriage broke up.

Now, Alice’s younger brother, Benjamin, and her best friend, Morgan Hensley have invited family and friends to their wedding, revealing that they have been seeing each other for three years. The news gets quite a mixed reaction from their families.

Morgan’s mother Sequoia isn’t even coming, instead staying at her ashram in Goa; her father, Peter strongly feels it’s not a good idea (the Weil family aren’t over their grief), but he is a little nervous about seeing Benji’s mother, intending to reveal his true feelings for her; Benji’s dad, Nick acts like he’s happy about it, but paying his share of the wedding on top of supporting a much younger wife and their daughter is a problem now that he’s lost his job, a state of affairs about which he’s told no-one.

After divorcing Nick, Linnie went back to her maiden name of Olsen, and she’s a bit anxious about her plus-one, the college philosophy lecturer she’s been dating; Ezra Newman has told Linnie he knew Alice when he was teaching at Manhattan Tech, but hasn’t been entirely honest about that relationship; and most people there will remember what happened at the memorial service held two weeks after Alice disappeared.

And the happy couple? Benji is always upbeat, optimistic, but is he ignoring the potentially tense interactions between them all? Morgan is a bit concerned about the fact that Benji still searches online for his sister. She’s also disturbed to see Ezra Newman here. And Benji’s grandmother, Judith, with her dementia can be a bit unpredictable, often candid and sometimes unpleasant.

All bar Judith and Sequoia contribute to the narrative and their concerns, past and ongoing, are gradually revealed in musings and flashbacks. Each adds some insight that may help understand the troubled teen who stepped off the bridge, and what may have contributed to such a desperate act.

Green paints a very realistic picture of the effects on those left behind of a teen suicide: grief, guilt, blame and, maybe, eventually, recovery. Her characters have depth and her descriptive prose is evocative: “the long years when each hour was tendrilled by an ache so intense, she feared it would strangle her in her sleep” is an example. The epilogue is good, but something is still lacking in the resolution. A worthy debut.
This unbiased review is from an uncorrected proof copy provided by NetGalley and Penguin Group/Viking

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Author Information

Lauren Aliza Green

Lauren Aliza Green holds an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers. Her work has appeared in Conjunctions, American Short Fiction, Glimmer Train, and elsewhere. She is the author of A Great Dark House, winner of the Poetry Society of America's Chapbook Fellowship, and the inaugural recipient of the Eavan Boland Emerging Poet Award, sponsored by Poetry Ireland and Stanford University. Her writing has received support from the Kenyon Review Workshop, Bread Loaf, and the Carson McCullers Center.

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