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Book summary and reviews of You Should Have Known by Jean Hanff Korelitz

You Should Have Known by Jean Hanff Korelitz

You Should Have Known

by Jean Hanff Korelitz

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  • Published:
  • Mar 2014
    448 pages
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Book Summary

Grace Reinhart Sachs is living the only life she ever wanted for herself. Devoted to her husband, a pediatric oncologist at a major cancer hospital, their young son Henry, and the patients she sees in her therapy practice, her days are full of familiar things: she lives in the very New York apartment in which she was raised, and sends Henry to the school she herself once attended.

Dismayed by the ways in which women delude themselves, Grace is also the author of a book You Already Know, in which she cautions women to really hear what men are trying to tell them. But weeks before the book is published a chasm opens in her own life: a violent death, a missing husband, and, in the place of a man Grace thought she knew, only an ongoing chain of terrible revelations. Left behind in the wake of a spreading and very public disaster, and horrified by the ways in which she has failed to heed her own advice, Grace must dismantle one life and create another for her child and herself.

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Reviews

Media Reviews

Starred Review. [E]xcellent literary mystery...The plot borders on hyperbole when it comes to upending what we know about one character, but that doesn't take much away from this intriguing and beautiful book." - Publishers Weekly

"A smart, leisurely study of midlife angst." - Kirkus

" Korelitz, the author of Admission, has crafted her second novel in the vein of Gone Girl or The Silent Wife; unfortunately, the suspense is marred by the overwritten prose. The book tends to be very New York-centric, so readers unfamiliar with the vagaries of life in Manhattan may find little to enjoy; still, fans of Korelitz's first novel may be curious enough to give this a shot." - LIbrary Journal

This information about You Should Have Known 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

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CarolK

A Study of a Marraige
Grace Reinhart Sachs has got it all. The trendy New York apartment, a son enrolled in the best private school, an oncologist husband who specializes in pediatrics; the perfect marriage, the perfect life. In her own right, Grace, a couple's therapist, is the author of a book soon to be published called You Should Have Known. It's the book for all her clients suffering the demise of their partnerships. If they had only noted the early signs, they would have known their marriages were destined for failure.

Things are going so well that I'm beginning to think, nice but so what? Without warning the proverbial you know what hits the fan and all goes south, plunging Grace into a reality she could not have imagined. To tell you more would ruin this beautifully constructed psychological study of a marriage.

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Author Information

Jean Hanff Korelitz

Jean Hanff Korelitz was born and raised in New York City and graduated from Dartmouth College and Clare College, Cambridge. She is the author of the novels A Jury of her Peers, The Sabbathday River, The White Rose and Admission, as well as Interference Powder, a novel for middle grade readers, and The Properties of Breath, a collection of poetry. A new novel, You Should have Known, will be published early in 2014. A film version of Admission starring Tina Fey, Paul Rudd and Lily Tomlin was released in March 2013.

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