3.5
Family Meal
ByPublisher Description
"Achingly and beautifully etched. . . Washington is a generous and gentle writer, with a profound capacity to face the cruelty and pain of contemporary American life while simultaneously offering his characters—and readers—an expansive space for self-forgiveness, hope, and nourishment."—The Washington Post
An irresistible, intimate novel about how those know us longest—even when they hurt us most—can also set the benchmark for love, from the National Book Award finalist and bestselling author of Memorial and Lot
The ghost of Kai, the love of Cam's life, won't leave Cam alone. He follows Cam from LA back home to Houston, his visits wild, tender, and unpredictable. But Cam has changed, and when he reenters the orbit of his childhood best friend TJ and his family's bakery, neither Cam nor TJ is sure how to navigate their charged estrangement. Searching for a way past all the wounds and secrets—a way to be okay together, maybe for the first time— the pair find hope and sustenance from the most unlikely source.
An irresistible, intimate novel about how those know us longest—even when they hurt us most—can also set the benchmark for love, from the National Book Award finalist and bestselling author of Memorial and Lot
The ghost of Kai, the love of Cam's life, won't leave Cam alone. He follows Cam from LA back home to Houston, his visits wild, tender, and unpredictable. But Cam has changed, and when he reenters the orbit of his childhood best friend TJ and his family's bakery, neither Cam nor TJ is sure how to navigate their charged estrangement. Searching for a way past all the wounds and secrets—a way to be okay together, maybe for the first time— the pair find hope and sustenance from the most unlikely source.
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesFamily Meal Reviews
3.5
BelievableChange and growDiverse representationMinor characters stand outMorally ambiguousMultilayeredOriginalRelatableStrong relationshipsEpic scopeLoose endsNonlinear narrativeSlow-pacedSteady pacingWell-structuredEerieExpansiveImmersive world-buildingSetting fits the storyBeautifully-writtenEasy to readFunnyOriginalStraightforwardWittyDeathEating disordersGriefSelf-harmSubstance abuseViolence
“1⭐️ (DNF @ 42%)
Okay wow...
I have so many things to say and I promise you that none of them are good. I made it nearly halfway which in itself absolutely shocked me cause this book was just so terrible in my opinion.
Let me start off by saying that I was ready to DNF this just a mere 50 pages in. But, I wanted to keep going because something about it intrigued me. I went into this with an open mind and I was ready to sit here and binge this book but my god.
The writing was awful.
It was really, really bad.
The sentences had zero flow or coherence to them. It was stop and go, stop and go, stop and go the entire part that I had read.
In fact, my last straw for this book was the fact that and ENTIRE SENTENCE. LASTED 2 PAGES LONG. 1 sentence.
It was clunky. It was oversimplified. It was all around not well-written.
There were no indications of dialogue a majority of the time so you could never tell who was talking and who was reacting besides the occasional, "____ says." or "says ____". It was so tedious and boring and not at all a way to capture the readers attention.
I feel like I could have enjoyed the premise of this book a lot better had it not been for the writing. This book deals heavily on drug addiction and unprotected sex as a way to cope with grief. It is about finding who is really with you and the family in those you're closest too, even if not blood related.
This book shows how grief can destroy a life and how it can hurt everyone around you when in reality, you're just trying to simply survive.
I wish that the overall theme of this book made up for the fact that I just couldn't like any other element of the story, but it was like pulling teeth trying to get into this book.
I wanted to give it the benefit of the doubt, but based on what I read?
The reviews I came across were exactly right.
I too couldn't get into the story or care about these characters. I found our MMC to be utterly insufferable and this man just got under my skin the whole time.
Let this be your sign to possibly not read this if you come across the book. I found just about nothing redeemable that made me want to continue, so of course I rated this book and reviewed it on the parts that I did in fact read. I had high hopes for this book, as the premise sounded so good. But the execution missed by not only a landslide, but a damn avalanche. Definitely won't be picking up another book by this author.”
“If I have to read one more book that has a sentence that runs on for 2 pages, I’m going to walk into traffic.”
“This felt so extremely intimate. Love and death and friendship and sex and the complications of all of it. We really are so lucky when we find love even if we don’t get to keep it forever.”
About Bryan Washington
Bryan Washington is the author of the story collection Lot and the bestselling novel Memorial. He is also the winner of a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Award, a New York Public Library Young Lions Award, an Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence, an International Dylan Thomas Prize, two Lambda Literary Awards, and an O. Henry Prize, and was a finalist for the James Tait Black Prize, the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, a PEN/Robert W. Bingham prize finalist, and a National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. He is a columnist for The New York Times Magazine and his fiction has appeared in The New Yorker and The Best American Short Stories. He divides his time between Houston and Osaka.
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