The Spectacular
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Hillary Huber
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Helen Lloyd
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Alex McKenna
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By:
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Zoe Whittall
About this listen
Three generations of women strive for real freedom in this startling, provocative novel exploring sexuality, gender, and maternal ambivalence, from the acclaimed author of The Best Kind of People.
“In the best books, characters feel like my friends, but with the mothers of The Spectacular, they came to feel like my family.”—Torrey Peters, author of Detransition, Baby
It’s 1997 and Missy is a cellist in an indie rock band on tour across America. At twenty-two years old, she gets on stage every night and plays the song about her absent mother that made the band famous. As the only girl in the band, she’s determined to party just as hard as everyone else, loving and leaving a guy in every town. But then she meets a tomboy drummer who is hard to forget, and a forgotten flap of cocaine strands her at the border.
Forty-something Carola is just surfacing from a sex scandal at the yoga center where she has been living when she sees her daughter, Missy, for the first time in ten years—on the cover of a music magazine.
Ruth is eighty-three and planning her return to the Turkish seaside village where she spent her childhood. But when her granddaughter, Missy, winds up crashing at her house, she decides it’s time that the strong and stubborn women in her family find a way to understand one another again.
In this sharply observed novel, Zoe Whittall captures three very different women who each struggle to build an authentic life. Definitions of family, romance, gender, and love will radically change as they seek out lives that are nothing less than spectacular.
©2021 Zoe Whittall (P)2021 Random House AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
"Whittall’s knockout novel is a multigenerational riot of grrrlhood and womanhood, a brisk and wistful tour through the ambivalence of responsibility." (Oprah Daily)
"The Spectacular is an homage to womanhood, motherhood, sexuality, and queerness as it chronicles the lives of three ferociously strong protagonists who are wildly different from one another." (Associated Press)
"Zoe Whittall’s taut novel The Spectacular has all the trappings to become the season’s dishiest read. It’s also a gem of literary fiction.... In Whittall’s smart and capable hands, these unconventional women are given the space to experience their full, complicated lives." (BookPage)
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Story
In an idyllic Los Angeles neighborhood, where generations enjoy deep roots in old homes, the O’Rourke family fits right in. Miriam and Craig are both artists and their four children carry on the legacy. When their teenage son, Nick, is diagnosed with schizophrenia, a tumultuous decade ensues in which the family careens off the conventional course. Like the 10 Biblical plagues, they are hit by one catastrophe after another: violence, evictions, arrests, a suicide attempt, a near-drowning - even cancer and a brain tumor - play against the backdrop of a wild teenage bacchanal.
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So Beautifully Written
- By Michael on 08-01-22
By: Miriam Feldman
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The Stuff that Never Happened
- A Novel
- By: Maddie Dawson
- Narrated by: Teri Clark Linden
- Length: 11 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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Annabelle McKay knows she shouldn’t have any complaints. She’s been in a stable marriage that’s lasted almost three decades and has provided her with two wonderful children and thousands of family dinners around a sturdy oak table. Other wives envy the fact that Grant is not the type of man who would ever cheat on her or leave her for a younger woman. The trouble is Annabelle isn’t sure she wants to be married to Grant anymore. The trouble is she’s still in love with someone else.
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Don’t pass this one up.
- By Lauren on 03-10-20
By: Maddie Dawson
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Two Truths and a Lie
- A Novel
- By: Meg Mitchell Moore
- Narrated by: Courtney Patterson
- Length: 10 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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Truth: Sherri Griffin and her daughter, Katie, recently moved to the idyllic beach town of Newburyport, Massachusetts. They’ve been welcomed by Rebecca Coleman, unofficial former leader of the Newburyport Mom Squad, and her teenage daughter Alexa, Katie’s new babysitter. Truth: Alexa has time on her hands after a falling-out with her friends involving her popular YouTube channel.
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Really more of a YA novel...
- By Faith W. on 09-04-20
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With or Without You
- By: Caroline Leavitt
- Narrated by: Julia Whelan
- Length: 9 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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After almost 20 years together, Stella and Simon are starting to run into problems. An up-and-coming rock musician when they first met, Simon has been clinging to dreams of fame even as the possibility of it has grown dimmer, and now that his band might finally be on the brink again, he wants to go on the road, leaving Stella behind.
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not my cup of tea
- By Grekis on 12-23-20
By: Caroline Leavitt
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Embassy Wife
- A Novel
- By: Katie Crouch
- Narrated by: Marni Penning
- Length: 13 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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Persephone Wilder, a displaced genius posing as the wife of an American diplomat in Namibia, takes her job as a representative of her country seriously and comes up with an intricate set of rules to survive a range of problems: how to dress in hundred-degree weather without showing too much skin, how not to look drunk at embassy functions, and how to eat roasted oryx with grace. She also suspects her husband is not actually the ambassador’s general counsel but instead a secret agent in the CIA. She takes the new trailing spouse, Amanda Evans, under her wing....
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Have narrator re-record this book
- By Amazon Customer on 09-30-21
By: Katie Crouch
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The Good Father
- By: Diane Chamberlain
- Narrated by: Kirby Heyborne, Arielle DeLisle, Emily Durante
- Length: 10 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Four years ago, 19-year-old Travis Brown made a choice: to raise his newborn daughter on his own. While most of his friends were out partying and meeting girls, Travis was at home, changing diapers and worrying about keeping food on the table. But he's never regretted his decision. Bella is the light of his life. The reason behind every move he makes. And so far, she is fed. Cared for. Safe. But when Travis loses his construction job and his home, the security he's worked so hard to create for Bella begins to crumble....
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A must-read tear jerker!
- By Wayne on 12-01-15
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Snap Out of It
- A Novel
- By: Maddie Dawson
- Narrated by: Joyce Bean
- Length: 10 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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After three marriages and a lot of living, resilient Billie Slate knows exactly what trouble love can bring. Now she’s reinvented herself as the Heartbreak Bunny, an on-call performance artist who can heal anyone who’s been burned by that four-letter word, LOVE, by hopping about and whisking away sad mementos from their past relationships. Call it magic. Call it peculiar. But her bunny costume is as perfect as her breakup mantra: SNAP OUT OF IT.
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REFRESHINGLY WONDERFUL
- By Iteachart on 03-07-23
By: Maddie Dawson
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Miss Fortune
- Fresh Perspectives on Having It All from Someone Who Is Not Okay
- By: Lauren Weedman
- Narrated by: Lauren Weedman
- Length: 8 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Lauren Weedman is not okay. She's living what should be the good life in sunny Los Angeles. After a gig as a correspondent with The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, she scored parts in blockbuster movies, which led to memorable recurring roles on HBO's Hung and Looking. She had a loving husband and an adorable baby boy. In these comedic essays, she turns a piercingly observant, darkly funny lens on the ways her life is actually not okay.
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Good
- By Ajules29 on 04-02-16
By: Lauren Weedman
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The Wanderer
- Thunder Point, Book 1
- By: Robyn Carr
- Narrated by: Therese Plummer
- Length: 10 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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Nestled on the Oregon coast is a small town of rocky beaches and rugged charm. Locals love the land’s unspoiled beauty. Developers see it as a potential gold mine. When newcomer Hank Cooper learns he’s been left an old friend’s entire beachfront property, he finds himself with a community’s destiny in his hands. Cooper has never been a man to settle in one place, and Thunder Point was supposed to be just another quick stop. But Cooper finds himself getting involved with the town. And with Sarah Dupre, a woman as complicated as she is beautiful.
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4.5 The Wanderer Stars
- By whatcha.listening.to on 11-09-17
By: Robyn Carr
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Lone Stars
- By: Justin Deabler
- Narrated by: Michael Crouch
- Length: 10 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Lone Stars follows the arc of four generations of a Texan family in a changing America. Julian Warner, a father at last, wrestles with a question his husband posed: what will you tell our son about the people you came from, now that they're gone? Finding the answers takes Julian back in time to Eisenhower's immigration border raids, an epistolary love affair during the Vietnam War, crumbling marriages, queer migrations to Cambridge and New York, up to the disorienting polarization of Obama's second term.
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Read for bookclub but fell in Love
- By Ericka Lawson on 09-11-22
By: Justin Deabler
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Fault Lines
- A Novel
- By: Emily Itami
- Narrated by: Lydia Wilson
- Length: 5 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Mizuki is a Japanese housewife. She has a hardworking husband, two adorable children, and a beautiful Tokyo apartment. It’s everything a woman could want, yet sometimes she wonders whether she would rather throw herself off the high-rise balcony than spend another evening not talking to her husband and hanging up laundry.
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Confused by the choice of narrator
- By Bri T. on 02-13-22
By: Emily Itami
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Kissing Games of the World
- By: Sandi Kahn Shelton
- Narrated by: Myra Platt
- Length: 13 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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What if the one person you can't bear to be with is also the one person you can't bear to be without? Jamie McClintock is a free-spirited artist and single mother who has at last found peace and freedom sharing a farmhouse with an elderly man and his young grandson. But when the old man dies suddenly her idyllic country life comes to a halt as the old man's estranged son, Nate, returns to claim the house and his child.
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Great Writer, Great Narrator ! Loved it!
- By Ms. Critic on 05-30-09
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The UnAmericans
- Stories
- By: Molly Antopol
- Narrated by: Jennifer Van Dyck
- Length: 7 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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Again and again, Molly Antopol’s deeply sympathetic characters struggle for footing in an uncertain world, hounded by forces beyond their control. Their voices are intimate and powerful and they resonate with searing beauty. Antopol is a superb young talent, and The UnAmericans will long be remembered for its wit, humanity, and heart.
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Sensational stories! Brilliant new author.
- By MidwestGeek on 05-04-14
By: Molly Antopol
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Chanel Bonfire
- By: Wendy Lawless
- Narrated by: Wendy Lawless
- Length: 6 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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By the time Wendy Lawless turned 17, she'd known for quite some time that she didn't have a normal mother. But that didn't stop her from wanting one.... Georgann Rea didn't bake cookies or go to PTA meetings; she wore a mink coat and always had a lit Dunhill plugged into her cigarette holder. She went through men like Kleenex, and didn't like dogs or children. Georgann had the ice queen beauty of a Hitchcock heroine and the cold heart to match.
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Not an Engaging Listen
- By Sobriquet on 03-13-13
By: Wendy Lawless