A Reason to See You Again

A Novel

By: Jami Attenberg

Narrated by: Stacey Glemboski

From the New York Times bestselling author Jami Attenberg comes a dazzling novel of family, following a troubled mother and her two daughters over forty years through a swiftly changing American landscape as they seek lives they can fully claim as their own.

The women of the Cohen family are in crisis. After the death of their patriarch, Rudy, the glue that held them all together, everyone’s lives soon take a dramatic turn.

Shelly, the younger of the two Cohen sisters, runs off to the West Coast to immerse herself in the emerging (and lucrative) world of technology. Her sister, Nancy, gets married at the age of twenty-one to a traveling salesman with a shadowy lifestyle, while their mother, Frieda, hurls herself into a boozy, troubled existence in Miami, trying to forget the past even as it haunts her.

But each woman must learn in her own way that running from the past can’t save you—and they must make life-altering decisions about what they want their family to be and what they need for themselves to move forward.

Beginning in the 1970s and spanning forty years, A Reason to See You Again takes the reader on a kaleidoscopic journey through motherhood, the American workforce, the tech industry, the self-help movement, inherited trauma, the ever-evolving ways we communicate with one another, and the many unexpected forms that love can take.

Story line was weak!

It was boring and the writing was very boring. I barely made it to the end.

Good read

I don’t write too many reviews but wanted write one for this book — mainly because there were so few of them. Good storyteller and a good read.

The perfect length for an interesting story

I used to love long books. No more. Anyway, this was the perfect length for this book, which spans decades but manages to feel complete with well-realized characters, some more interesting than others--for instance, I did not need Margaret's POV. AT ALL. It would have served the novel better to keep to POVs "in the family."

Most depressing book ever

This book was so hard to listen to. Just broken people being broken people and few redeemable qualities.

Interesting technique, reverse foreshadowing, outright stating what happens in the future.

I liked the dislikable characters and could relate to the raw emotion. At times the plot skipped too many details.