Fall Sale! Join BookBrowse today and discover exceptional books for only $3 / Month.

Summary and Reviews of Glassworks by Olivia Wolfgang-Smith

Glassworks by  Olivia Wolfgang-Smith

Glassworks

by Olivia Wolfgang-Smith
  • BookBrowse Review:
  • Critics' Consensus:
  • First Published:
  • May 16, 2023, 368 pages
  • Paperback:
  • Feb 2025, 368 pages
  • Rate this book

  • Buy This Book

About This Book

Book Summary

A gorgeously written and irresistibly intimate queer novel that follows one family across four generations to explore legacy and identity in all its forms.

In 1910, Agnes Carter makes the wrong choice in marriage. After years as an independent woman of fortune, influential with the board of a prominent university because of her financial donations, she is now subject to the whims of an abusive, spendthrift husband. But when Bohemian naturalist and glassblower Ignace Novak reignites Agnes's passion for science, Agnes begins to imagine a different life, and she sets her mind to getting it.

Agnes's desperate actions breed secrecy, and the resulting silence echoes into the future. Her son, Edward, wants to be a man of faith but struggles with the complexities of the mortal world while apprenticing at a stained-glass studio.

In 1986, Edward's child, Novak-just Novak-is an acrobatic window washer cleaning Manhattan high-rises, who gets caught up in the plight of Cecily, a small town girl remade as a gender-bending Broadway ingénue.

And in 2015, Cecily's daughter Flip-a burned-out stoner trapped in a bureaucratic job firing cremains into keepsake glass ornaments-resolves to break the cycle of inherited secrets, reaching back through the generations in search of a family legacy that feels true.

For readers of Mary Beth Keane, Min Jin Lee, and Rebecca Makkai, Glassworks is "an era-spanning, family and chosen-family following, marvel of a debut." (CJ Hauser, author of Family of Origin)

one

The Bohemian glass modeler went mad the summer of Agnes's marriage, and naturally at first society and the university board and Agnes's husband assumed a connection.

They had been so often thrown together, since Ignace had come to Boston. Since Agnes had brought him to Boston. It was nearly as if she had captained the ship herself, according to gossip and political cartoonists. Really it was her money that had done it. Dollar-green paper hands crewing the vessel, packing Ignace Novak's valises, shuttering his studio in Prague—and installing him in Cambridge with shelves of glass and enamel and a foot-powered bellows to melt it and a shotgun-startled expression on his face, hat knocked back as if by a blow, hair frazzled with the grease of his sudden voyage.

Agnes had long since learned what money could do, for better and for worse. It could tangle people into hopeless snarls, or spin them into neat skeins according to her specifications. It took skill to wield such a tool ...

Please be aware that this discussion guide will contain spoilers!
  1. Agnes's inherited wealth is due to her great-great-grandmother Elizabeth's partnership with "colonial she-merchant" Prudence Smith. Why do you think Elizabeth's and Prudence's stories are shared in this novel? What influence did their relationship have on Agnes?
  2. How does the idea of wealth and inheritance weave throughout the story?
  3. Why do you think the author chose to leave Agnes's husband nameless, calling him simply "her husband"?
  4. After Ignace is stung by a honeybee, Agnes sketches it, and Ignace later creates a glass model of it. The honeybee is described as "dangerous with a power far beyond its size, but only at the price of self-annihilation." Are any of the characters like a honeybee? What might the tiny glass model represent for this ...
Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Reviews

BookBrowse Review

BookBrowse

Olivia Wolfgang-Smith's novel, Glassworks, is an incandescent debut that follows the lives of four people on the brink of metamorphosis. In addition to a marvelously multi-layered plot, Wolfgang-Smith's characters are drawn superbly, and her prose is as luminous as the glass about which she writes...continued

Full Review (668 words)

This review is available to non-members for a limited time. For full access, become a member today.

(Reviewed by Kim Kovacs).

Media Reviews

Good Housekeeping, Best Books of 2023 So Far
This captivating saga that feels as taut and fragile as the glass-blown ornaments at the center of it follows four generations of people who discover that one wrong choice can echo across the ages. It's a twisty tale of love, chosen family, hard choices and harder people that picks up speed as it goes, careening breathlessly toward the last page.

Booklist (starred review)
Olivia Wolfgang-Smith's first novel is a generation-spanning epic of family, inheritance, and identity…With richly drawn characters and deft storytelling, Glassworks is a beautifully crafted, memorable debut.

Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
This sophisticated debut from Wolfgang-Smith traces an evolving emotional legacy through four generations of a family while examining the basic question of 'how to love something without letting it have everything'…Wolfgang-Smith writes like a glass blower, patiently building and enhancing to create durable beauty. Simply put, this is a wonderful, wonderful book.

Publishers Weekly
Wolfgang-Smith contends with vocation, identity, and the meaning of family in her appealing debut...As the various threads tie together, the author makes clever use of her central metaphor, considering glass as sharp, fluid, changeable, and even surprising—much like the characters she depicts. This is a radiant exploration of a complex legacy.

Author Blurb Cara Blue Adams, author of You Never Get It Back
With warmth, vividness, and humor, Wolfgang-Smith examines what we inherit and what is lost to silence and shows us how people come into themselves alongside the fragile legacies they build. A dazzling new voice.

Author Blurb CJ Hauser, author of Family of Origin
A page turner, a work of gorgeous prose, a rollicking good story full of brilliant observations about the human experience and characters I sometimes forget I do not know in real life...If Elizabeth McCracken and David Mitchell had a love child, it might look a bit like this era-spanning, family and chosen-family following, marvel of a debut.

Author Blurb Jennine Capó Crucet, author of Make Your Home Among Strangers
Rendered in achingly gorgeous prose, Glassworks sweeps across generations, forging an engrossing portrait of a complex inheritance-a wise and inventive debut.

Reader Reviews

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Beyond the Book



Harvard's Glass Flowers

Apple Blossom detail in Glass Flowers exhibitOlivia Wolfgang-Smith's novel Glassworks begins with the heroine employing a Czech glass artist to create a collection of realistic flora and fauna for her university in Boston. In interviews, the author has stated that she was inspired by Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka, a father-and-son team who created thousands of remarkably detailed biological models in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Leopold Blaschka (1822-1895) was born into a glassworking family that traced its roots in the craft back to 15th century Vienna. Although as a child he dreamed of being a painter, he was apprenticed to a jewelry maker and gem cutter, eventually joining his father in the family glass business. He cut his teeth in the trade creating costume jewelry ...

This "beyond the book" feature is available to non-members for a limited time. Join today for full access.

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Read-Alikes

Read-Alikes Full readalike results are for members only

If you liked Glassworks, try these:

  • There Are Rivers in the Sky jacket

    There Are Rivers in the Sky

    by Elif Shafak

    Published 2024

    About this book

    More by this author

    In the ancient city of Nineveh, on the bank of the River Tigris, King Ashurbanipal of Mesopotamia, erudite but ruthless, built a great library that would crumble with the end of his reign.

  • Cloud Cuckoo Land jacket

    Cloud Cuckoo Land

    by Anthony Doerr

    Published 2022

    About this book

    More by this author

    From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of All the Light We Cannot See, perhaps the most bestselling and beloved literary fiction of our time, comes a triumph of imagination and compassion, a soaring novel about children on the cusp of adulthood in a broken world, who find resilience, hope, and story.

We have 5 read-alikes for Glassworks, but non-members are limited to two results. To see the complete list of this book's read-alikes, you need to be a member.
Search read-alikes
How we choose read-alikes
Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Top Picks

  • Book Jacket: The Empusium
    The Empusium
    by Olga Tokarczuk
    Not long after checking into Willi Opitz's "Guesthouse for Gentlemen," young Mieczysław Wojnicz...
  • Book Jacket
    Suggested in the Stars
    by Yoko Tawada
    In Scattered All Over the Earth, Yoko Tawada's 2018 lightly dystopian novel, a ragtag group of young...
  • Book Jacket: Shred Sisters
    Shred Sisters
    by Betsy Lerner
    "No one will love you more or hurt you more than a sister" is a wry aphorism that appears late in ...
  • Book Jacket: Model Home
    Model Home
    by Rivers Solomon
    Rivers Solomon's novel Model Home opens with a chilling and mesmerizing line: "Maybe my mother is ...

Members Recommend

  • Book Jacket

    The Naming Song
    by Jedediah Berry

    Miyazaki meets Guillermo del Toro.

  • Book Jacket

    The Bog Wife
    by Kay Chronister

    Five West Virginia siblings unearth secrets after the rupture of a supernatural bargain tying their fate to their land.

Book Club Giveaway!
Win Let Us Descend

Let Us Descend by Jesmyn Ward

Jesmyn Ward imagines the life of an enslaved girl in the years before the Civil War in this instant classic.

Enter

Wordplay

Solve this clue:

J O the B

and be entered to win..