The Nest

On a wintry afternoon in New York City, Melody, Beatrice and Jack Plumb gather to confront their charismatic and reckless older brother, Leo, who has just been released from rehab. Leo’s bad behavior before entering rehab, culminating in a car crash while under the influence—a nineteen-year-old waitress beside him—has left the Plumbs’ joint trust fund—“The Nest,” as they’ve taken to calling it—endangered. All four siblings, at very different places in their lives, believe that this money will solve a host of self-inflicted problems and their consequences. And until Leo’s accident, they’d been mere months away from receiving it.

Can Leo get the Plumbs out of this mess, as he’s always been able to do for himself before? Or will the Plumb siblings have to do without the money and the future lives they’ve envisioned? As the siblings grapple with family tensions, old histories, and the significant emotional and financial cost of the accident, Sweeney introduces an unforgettable cast of supporting characters: Leo’s stalwart ex-girlfriend who now thinks that maybe, just maybe, he is capable of change; the waitress whose life was shattered in the accident; the Iraqi war veteran who falls in love with her; and a retired, grieving firefighter with a very big secret.

Tender, funny and deftly written, The Nest explores what money does to relationships, what happens to our ambitions over the course of our lives, and the fraught but unbreakable ties we have with our families. 

I'm going to chalk this one up to the fact that the marketing for this book really worked well on me. I follow a couple different publishers on Facebook, and I get their emails and stuff because I have purchased a few ebooks in the past, and this is a book was one that sounded good and I put it on my "to-read" list when I was first notified of it's pending release, and then I was continued to notified about it for the next few months. THEN I found it at Costco... so having been constantly reminded of it for months, I just picked it up and gave it a go.

This is one of those books that there really isn't anything wrong with, but it just isn't really going to be all that memorable. I didn't really like or dislike any of the characters, the plot was paced fine, but nothing really big happened to make it a real page turner... it was just "fine".

One of the issues may have been the sheer number of characters that narrated chapters in the book. If Sweeney had stuck to just the 4 siblings perhaps it wouldn't have seemed so disjointed, but once you get offspring and spouses and tenants and acquaintances  involved it all gets a bit convoluted. Having more than one narrator can sometimes be frustrating,  but having about 10 is a bit ridiculous. That being said, A Song of Ice and Fire has way more than that and somehow pulls it off for me, (maybe it seems more justified because of the great distances between characters?) so maybe Sweeney just needs to refine her technique a bit more.

The greatest highlight of this book is that I realized the only think I like almost as much as a birth story is a coming out story. I believe that homosexual relationships are very underrepresented in fiction so I LOVED reading about a gay couple's relationship. It was honestly the only thing I can really say I loved about this book. And it only lasted one chapter... not exactly enough to give it an all around high praise.

In conclusion, I wouldn't disuade or encourage anyone to read this book unless they were already interested. If it was on your "to-read" list already, maybe give it a shot. You might like it more than I did for different reasons. But I wouldn't recommend it just off the cuff to whomever was looking for a good next book to read. This is really a take it or leave it kind of book.