Sign up for our newsletters to receive our Most Anticipated Books of 2025!

Summary and Reviews of Playworld by Adam Ross

Playworld by Adam Ross

Playworld

A Novel

by Adam Ross
  • BookBrowse Review:
  • Critics' Consensus (7):
  • First Published:
  • Jan 7, 2025, 528 pages
  • Rate this book

About This Book

Book Summary

Griffin Hurt is in over his head. Between his role as Peter Proton on the hit TV show The Nuclear Family and the pressure of high school at New York's elite Boyd Prep—along with the increasingly compromising demands of his wrestling coach—he's teetering on the edge of collapse.

"In the fall of 1980, when I was fourteen, a friend of my parents named Naomi Shah fell in love with me. She was thirty-six, a mother of two, and married to a wealthy man. Like so many things that happened to me that year, it didn't seem strange at the time."

Then comes Naomi Shah, twenty-two years Griffin's senior. Unwilling to lay his burdens on his shrink—whom he shares with his father, mother, and younger brother, Oren—Griffin soon finds himself in the back of Naomi's Mercedes sedan, again and again, confessing all to the one person who might do him the most harm.

Less a bildungsroman than a story of miseducation, Playworld is a novel of epic proportions, bursting with laughter and heartache. Adam Ross immerses us in the life of Griffin and his loving (yet disintegrating) family while seeming to evoke the entirety of Manhattan and the ethos of an era—with Jimmy Carter on his way out and a B-list celebrity named Ronald Reagan on his way in. Surrounded by adults who embody the age's excesses—and who seem to care little about what their children are up to—Griffin is left to himself to find the line between youth and maturity, dependence and love, acting and truly grappling with life.

Excerpt
Playworld, by Adam Ross

Oren was always worth seeking out at these parties, because he was a fearless explorer of other people's rooms. Closed doors meant nothing to him. Closets were never off-limits. Bureaus begged to be opened, whether they belonged to strangers or to our parents, whose wall-length dresser he regularly raided with abandon. He'd found treasures there: rolls of quarters stacked like Lincoln Logs, reserved for the basement laundry machines but that we skimmed to play Missile Command at Stanley's Stationery Store; my father's dog tags, their gunmetal stamped with risen letters like Braille and revealing his given name, Hertzberg. (When Dad became an actor, he'd changed it to Hurt.) Buried beneath Mom's underwear, Oren had also uncovered her diaphragm, waiting until I was present to pop its plastic container. He stretched its dome with his fingers to a near-porous transparency.

"I think it's a yarmulke," he theorized.

"For what," I said, "the rain?" I sealed ...

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 $50 for 12 months or $18 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Reviews

BookBrowse Review

BookBrowse

Griffin's relationship with Amanda is the good stuff of fourteen-year-old boy fiction, familiar but heartfelt, and richly drawn. For all the great aspects of Playworld, though, the book fails to cohere into a great novel. The voice that holds these scenes together is often grating to me. Ross writes in this smooth, falsely literary style, at times inexplicably grandiose; his sentences have the cadence and sheen of "good" writing—important writing—but I kept getting snagged on sentences and phrases that seemed obviously grammatically incorrect, or at the very least that featured confusing misplaced modifiers. Beyond sloppiness, there is an annoying faux profundity in this style and in Griffin's thoughts. For all of Playworld's detail and hyperspecificity, for all its indictment of those people who abandon their responsibilities to others, it doesn't quite say as much as it thinks it does...continued

Full Review Members Only (1548 words)

(Reviewed by Chloe Pfeiffer).

Media Reviews

Los Angeles Times
Extraordinary ... A beguiling ode to a last era ... Ross is so adept at world-building that we are seduced by his vision of the Big Apple as wholly enchanting and mystical ... I didn't want it to end. The story is so rich and filled with intriguing—if morally questionable—characters that it's immersive. Line for line the book is a revelation.

Vogue
Dazzling and endearing ... Gorgeously textured and frequently very funny, [Playworld] revels in all the heady, scuzzy, confusing bits of coming of age.

The New Yorker
Engrossing ... Things come to a head one fateful summer as, amid personal and family tumult, the maturing Griffin begins to inhabit his most important role: himself.

Booklist
An epic bildungsroman ... While Griffin comes to understand the abuses inflicted on him, Ross' novel is free of lessons, as unjudging as poor Griffin, who can do nothing but weather the loss of innocence we can all see overtaking him like a cloud. Ross offers surprising narrative flights, stunning passages, and a nostalgia-soaked setting in so-real-you're there, bygone New York City.

Kirkus Reviews
An intriguing coming-of-age story that's rich in atmosphere but falls short on resolution.

Publishers Weekly
Compulsively readable.

Author Blurb Alexander Chee, author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel
Playworld is a novel that is a time machine of a kind, if they were ever used to seek revelations. I was reintroduced to an American history I lived through, and so much of what I had never known I'd forgotten, so much of what I was never taught to fear—but perhaps should have been. This was not my story but I saw mine in it—a boy lost in the house of adulthood, trying to learn how to be one of the people he sees around him. Haunting, mesmerizing, provoking—this novel is a triumph.

Author Blurb Brandon Taylor, author of The Late Americans
Playworld is an astonishing, immersive novel that deserves a place in the pantheon of Great New York Novels. I loved this book for its textures, its music, and its moral accounting of ordinary life and ordinary time. And the characters! What characters! This is a late-breaking classic and might very well be Ross's masterpiece.

Author Blurb Harlan Coben, author of Think Twice
A wonderful, full-bodied, modern-yet-old-school novel that brings the New York City of the 1980s to vibrant life. Ross will make you laugh and break your heart. I haven't felt this immersed in a work of fiction in a long time.

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 $50 for 12 months or $18 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Beyond the Book



This Historical Deed: The Attempted Assassination of Ronald Reagan

Black and white photo of Ronald Reagan waving to the crowd surrounded by men in suits shortly before assassination attemptAdam Ross's novel Playworld takes place between 1980 and 1981, during which time the characters follow with interest the election, presidency, and attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan.

The attempted assassination of Reagan took place in March 1981, just a few months after he was inaugurated for his first term. The would-be assassin was 25-year-old John Hinckley, Jr., who opened fire as the president was leaving a hotel in Washington, DC. Three of his bullets hit other men who were with Reagan, and one ricocheted off the president's limo and hit him underneath his armpit. A Secret Service agent got him into the limo and drove off, only realizing later that Reagan had been hit. He was in the hospital for twelve days, lost over half ...

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 $50 for 12 months or $18 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Read-Alikes

Read-Alikes Full readalike results are for members only

If you liked Playworld, try these:

  • Martyr! jacket

    Martyr!

    by Kaveh Akbar

    Published 2024

    About this book

    A newly sober, orphaned son of Iranian immigrants, guided by the voices of artists, poets, and kings, embarks on a remarkable search for a family secret that leads him to a terminally ill painter living out her final days in the Brooklyn Museum. Electrifying, funny, and wholly original, Martyr! heralds the arrival of an essential new voice in ...

  • The Mighty Red jacket

    The Mighty Red

    by Louise Erdrich

    Published 2024

    About this book

    More by this author

    In this stunning novel, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award–winning author Louise Erdrich tells a story of love, natural forces, spiritual yearnings, and the tragic impact of uncontrollable circumstances on ordinary people's lives.

We have 4 read-alikes for Playworld, 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.
More books by Adam Ross
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 $50 for 12 months or $18 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

BookBrowse Book Club

  • Book Jacket
    The Wager
    by David Grann
    From the bestselling author of Killers of the Flower Moon, a gripping story of shipwreck, survival, and savagery, culminating in a court martial that reveals a shocking truth.
  • Book Jacket
    The Bluest Eye
    by Toni Morrison
    The story of a black girl in America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others. First published 1970; won the 1993 Nobel Prize.
  • Book Jacket
    The Frozen River
    by Ariel Lawhon
    From the bestselling author of I Was Anastasia comes a historical mystery inspired by 18th-century midwife Martha Ballard, who investigates a shocking murder.
Who Said...

We must believe in luck. For how else can we explain the success of those we don't like?

Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!

Members Recommend

  • Book Jacket

    Beast of the North Woods
    by Annelise Ryan

    When a local fisherman is mauled to death, it seems like the only possible cause is a mythical creature.

  • Book Jacket

    Harlem Rhapsody
    by Victoria Christopher Murray

    The extraordinary story of the woman who ignited the Harlem Renaissance.

  • Book Jacket

    Three Days in June
    by Anne Tyler

    A new Anne Tyler novel destined to be an instant classic: a socially awkward mother of the bride navigates the days before and after her daughter's wedding.

Wordplay

Solve this clue:

T the L

and be entered to win..