I hoped for more from this debut novel from respected librarian and book commentator Nancy Pearl. She has said that she wanted to write the sort of novel she loved to read but I am not at all convinced this one would have passed muster if she hadn't herself been the author. It’s relatively readable, if somewhat tedious, but I couldn’t engage with the characters and the story is frankly silly at times. It tells of the marriage of George and Lizzie. George is an all-round nice guy, whereas Lizzie had a troubled childhood and adolescence with her psychologist parents – and very one-dimensional they are too – and at college embarks on what she calls The Great Game, an exploit that didn’t convince me in any way. This seems to define the rest of her life and it wasn’t long before I found her one of the more irritating characters in literature. All in all, I found the book disappointing though I can see that many readers will enjoy the romance and the admittedly often perceptive and insightful portrait of a marriage.

I wanted to love this novel from the famed Nancy Pearl, and I enjoyed the first few chapters, but found myself confused about the timeline and the plot. As Lizzie starts college and meets her roommate, I stopped reading.

Nancy Pearl’s novel George and Lizzie, could very well be renamed George, Lizzie and the Shadow of Her Manic Pixie Dream Boy. Of course this title would be a mouthful, but it more or less describes the plot in its entirety.

And yes, the Manic Pixie Dream Boy/Girl is essentially a modern-age film trope, but we’ve seen it often enough in literature too.Think Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby, the doyenne of Manic Pixie Dream Girls. But the Manic Pixie does exist in its male counterpart, and in George and Lizzie it exists to an almost annoying degree.

George and Lizzie are married, yes, but marriage means different things for both of them. For George, marriage to Lizzie is a shared state of mostly happiness in which the only dark cloud is Lizzie’s constant dissatisfaction. For Lizzie, marriage to George is the result of her reluctant acceptance of his love, but also a source of constant frustration rooted in endless longing, which she has nourished through the years, keeping the reasons for it purposefully hidden from George.

Lizzie’s secret is the years-old love for her Manic Pixie Dream Boy, a.k.a. Jack, her college boyfriend who dumps Lizzie unceremoniously after only ninety days of dating. Somehow in her mind he keeps his status of personified perfection, becoming her endless source of fantasy-filled scenarios and unjustified glorification of very non-existent qualities.

It must be said of course that Ms. Pearl’s longtime experience as a librarian, literary critic and NPR host, unquestionably speaks volumes about her talent for analyzing and recommending novels to readers. But in George and Lizzie, Ms. Pearl often fumbles with establishing character motivation and depth, a shortcoming that she would probably be quick to point out herself.

The opening chapter reveals how George and Lizzie meet, an unexpected encounter in a bowling alley, after Lizzie has her heart broken and George is doing his utmost best to impress another girl. A fortunate (or not) collision of their bowling balls in one of the lanes sparks the introduction, but there’s too much about Lizzie that George ignores.

By way of Ms. Pearl’s numerous flashback sequences, Lizzie and George’s opposing childhoods are obvious. She is the product of two famous behavioral psychologists who treat their only daughter as a permanent science experiment. Her only source of parental love was provided by a school-age babysitter. He is the son of a dentist and a housewife, lovingly nurtured and regularly fawned over. This is the first noticeable chasm between George and Lizzie, but certainly not the only one.

Lizzie’s behavior on occasion is bizarre at best, disturbing at worst. A blunt example of this happens in her senior year of high school when Lizzie, along with a friend, make plans to “sleep their way though the entire football team” as a form of challenge and payback, since their college-bound boyfriends are presumably cheating. Even though the friend in the end bails from the plan, Lizzie dives in wholeheartedly grabbing her friend’s share of the players as well as her own.

By the end of the Great Game as she later labels her project, she has had sex with twenty-three football players. Suffice to say Lizzie is judged as the class “slut,” even more so when it is made known that among the players she tussled with is her own boyfriend’s younger brother. Lizzie feels compelled to tell her parents about her kooky senior year project, if only to see if it goads them into some sort of reaction. Aside from the possibility of a noteworthy academic article, it doesn’t. Evidently the looming possibilities of either STDs or teenage pregnancy aren’t enough of a concern for either the author or Lizzie’s detached parents to mention.

Perhaps Lizzie’s chilly upbringing along with this dallying in promiscuity is the pilot light that starts what happens later. In her Ann Arbor college, Lizzie meets the much-mentioned Jack in a 20th century poetry class, which is an immense foreshadowing of their doomed liaison. Their romance is intense, the sex is abundant and they read poetry to each other (we did say foreshadowing). But Manic Pixie Dream Boys are not lasting relationship material, and he eventually breaks up with Lizzie by way of an ambiguous letter after he leaves school for what is supposed to be a brief vacation.

Lizzie cannot or will not admit that Jack is a callous, superficial charlatan, but instead blames his abandonment on an article published by her parents in a psychology magazine in which they coldly and mathematically analyze the sexual debauchery of an unknown teenage female. Lizzie initially has no plans to confess to Jack that the subject of the article is her, but she ends up doing so anyway. Jack’s subsequent desertion convinces Lizzie that the demise of the relationship rests solely on her shoulders.

Much to Ms. Pearl’s credit, the flashbacks even though at times unnecessarily detailed, are in no way confusing or vacuous. Details about George and Lizzie’s grandparents and parents are revealed, and there’s even have a glimpse of the current lives of some of the football players she slept with. It remains a tad ambiguous why the latter is important to the plot as it resembles a footnote at best.

George and Lizzie both come from Jewish families who handle their past in radically different ways, opening the door for the differences in how they’re raised by their parents. Lizzie even mentions to George at one point that she won’t take his name (Goldrosen), but this doesn’t mean that she wants to keep hers either (Bultmann). Why don’t they both change their names, she proposes. George firmly declines. This is the least of Lizzie’s often snide and sometimes downright mean remarks, once referring to two of George’s friends as “BORR-innnggg,” with consequently George volleying back that she is “a real snob.” Lizzie is properly shamed but this isn’t by any means the end of it.

As George and Lizzie’s relationship moves forward (the evolution of it often against the wishes of Lizzie herself) Jack’s memory becomes stronger instead of fading into oblivion. Here, Lizzie embodies the literary archetype of the unhappy and unfulfilled heroine. An Emma Bovary whose husband Charles can’t hold a candle to either Rodolfe or Léon, or an Anna Karenina whose carnal desire for Count Vronsky convinces her that her happiness depends solely on him.

Jack is nothing more than an illusion, a fantasy, but Lizzie must keep the fantasy alive lest she admit that Jack never loved her at all. In the course of her marriage to George, she spends time perusing phone books and later the Internet, looking for Jack. She searches for him during her honeymoon, in every city she and George visit, when he transitions from dentistry to an Anthony Robbins-type motivational speaker.

Jack is there, or at least the memory of him, when she’s discussing wedding plans with her future mother-in-law, and Lizzie imagines “how stupid Jack would find all this and how crazy she was to go along with it.” She wonders repeatedly how she “could break off her engagement to George in the nicest way possible when Jack came back to save her from this disastrous mistake.”

It’s clear that Lizzie’s unhappiness is of her own making, just like Emma Bovary was responsible for hers. But if she doesn’t want him, why marry George at all? Possibly because a small fragment of her mind recognizes the possibility that her misery is self-made. The fact that Lizzie keeps Jack’s existence and how he’s still very much present in her better-life fantasies a secret from George reveals in some way her shame in admitting that she is more in love with a pipe dream than she is with her husband.

The end proves quite unsatisfying, as the resulting confrontation between Lizzie and George regarding the fate of their marriage as well as Lizzie’s resolution about Jack leads to a dull and unsavory conclusion. Ms. Pearl’s narrative throughout the novel is accomplished enough, despite or perhaps due to how wholly unlikeable Lizzie is as a character, contrasting sharply with George, his family, and even Lizzie’s best friend Marla, who tries many times to provide her with a reality check that Lizzie stubbornly refuses.

But the final verdict we are left to deliver is to ruefully think that George could do better than his Manic Pixie Dream Boy yearning wife.

In her debut novel, Nancy Pearl tells the story of a marriage. It was beyond me why Lizzie and George got married in the first place and it remained a mystery to me why they stayed together. I have the feeling I kind of missed the point of this story. The main focus is on Lizzie. George, in my opinion, remained a bit of an underdeveloped character. While George stems from a supportive, loving family, Lizzie grew up as the only daughter of two behavioural psychologists who regarded her childhood and youth as research material for their work. In highschool, Lizzie does something that keeps haunting her for years to come (another thing I didn’t understand. I would have just filed it under stupid adolescent ideas best to forget). The story keeps jumping back and forth in time and is interlaced with little vignettes about secondary characters relating to Lizzie’s high school escapades. While I got used to the nonlinear storyline, I failed to see the point of the vignettes. I don’t think they added anything significant to the book, but they weren’t particularly distracting either. I think this is where Pearl’s writing came in. I enjoyed her style and liked the underlying wit and this was certainly different from your standard relationship story.
Overall, a bit of a mixed bag which improved as the story progressed. Some humor, some emotions, and I liked the ending. But ultimately, I found it difficult to comprehend Lizzie’s behavior and her thought processes, and just blaming it on her messed up childhood/youth and unsupportive parents didn’t work for me either. Perhaps an interesting pick as a discussion book. I would imagine there’d be plenty of different views about Lizzie and George and their families and friends.
I received an ARC via NetGalley.

I couldn't wait to read the novel from my favorite NPR host. George and Lizzie is about love, and marriage and how we all enter into it with different expectations.

George and Lizzie are married and have different ideas of what that should look like. George had a loving childhood while Lizzie was deemed an experiment by her famous psychologist parents. Nancy Pearl's humorous writing was so refreshing! I laughed, felt empathy for both George and Lizzie, and liked how the book discussed the past while discussing the present. I don't want to give too much away, but I will say that this is a fantastic look at the struggles and joys in relationships and both characters are great! Usually, I struggle with liking one or both of them, but I found myself rooting for both. Would so recommend!

This is a really quirky and emotional story and a compelling character study. It may be called George and Lizzie, but it's mostly about Lizzie... her emotional trauma, her decisions, heartbreak, loves, hang-ups, and general life experiences. She had a strange childhood, and made a bit of a strange sexual game in high school that continues to haunt her long after most people would have chalked it up to adolescent mistakes.

Even after George and Lizzie get married, she is obsessed with her past. For the reader it's a bit unclear why exactly she can't let things go, and we begin to doubt she ever will. While she at least appreciates George, it's clear that she can't or won't allow herself to love him in the ardent way he loves her.

The story has moments of heartbreak and moments that will make you laugh. I enjoyed it. There are lots of football and poetry references, so if you're interested in either or both, it'll add to the experience. It certainly did for me. It was a completely unexpected addition to the story. Lizzie can be hard to identify with or understand, but I still felt warmth for the character even when I was thinking she needed pretty hefty therapy or a reality check. I loved the ending, too!

I received an ARC of this book from Net Galley and Touchstone, thank you! My review is honest and unbiased.

BROOKE’S REVIEW

Beloved librarian Nancy Pearl’s debut novel George and Lizzie explores a marriage. While George is happy and secure in the marriage, Lizzie finds herself unfulfilled. What follows is a tale that journeys from their initial “meet-cute” at the University of Michigan through their first decade of marriage. A secret of Lizzie’s finally pushes her to push past her ennui and make a decision about her path forward and her marriage with generous George.

A specific delight of this book are Lizzie’s book recommendations and gifts to others. They are like Easter eggs from Pearl throughout the book.

While many will appreciate this book because of their respect for Nancy Pearl, there is the general challenge that comes with not entirely likable narrators with this novel. Given the flood of rich narrative voices in recent debut novels, this book is one that I might not prioritize to read, while Pearl is an author I’ll continue to follow.

PRAISE

“[A]n homage to true love, painful childhood experiences, and emotional scars that last a lifetime. It’s a story of forgiveness, especially for one’s self….Extraordinary.” —The Washington Post

GEORGE AND LIZZIE is a fresh, sweet, funny, and completely charming love story between two people, two families, and two unlikely paths in life, which somehow find their way to each other. To read this novel is to see family, love, and life in a new light.
— Lisa Scottoline, #1 New York Times bestselling author

AUTHOR

Nancy Pearl is known as “America’s Librarian.” She speaks about the pleasures of reading at library conferences, to literacy organizations and community groups throughout the world and comments on books regularly on KUOW FM in Seattle, as well as KWGS in Tulsa, Oklahoma and Wisconsin Public Radio. Born and raised in Detroit, she received her master’s degree in library science in 1967 from the University of Michigan. She also received an MA in history from Oklahoma State University in 1977. Among her many honors and awards are the 2011 Librarian of the Year Award from Library Journal; and the 2011 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association. She also hosts a monthly television show, Book Lust with Nancy Pearl. She lives in Seattle with her husband.

As a final note, I received this book from NetGalley in exchange for an unbiased review.

Chose this title because of the author and was curious to find out if I'd enjoy her fiction. Had a difficult time getting through it, although the writing wasn't bad. Felt that some characters could have been more fully developed. The plot might have been better suited to a novella. Middle part of the book dragged for me, I'm sad to say.

When I heard that the woman known as “America’s Librarian” had written a novel, I’ll admit I may have had a few preconceived notions. Nancy Pearl is famous for providing recommendations on NPR and as the model for the first-ever Librarian Action Figure. I assumed the 72-year-old Pearl’s fiction debut would be something genteel along the lines of a Seattle-based Anne Tyler. I would not have guessed it begins with a teenage girl resolving to have sex with every starter on her high school’s entire football team, and then following through. As a longtime listener to Dan Savage’s sex-advice podcast, it takes a lot to shock me, but… yeah, that’s not quite what I was expecting.

Lizzie Bultmann is the only child of two professors of psychology who view her as little more than a living case study. (When she discusses the sleep-with-the-team plan with her best friend, Lizzie states that rather than grounding her for life if they found out, her parents would “want to watch. Maybe they’d bring along a grad student or two to take notes.”) “She wanted them to be curious about her, to want to know what went on below her polished surface… Maybe if they did find out… it would wake them up enough to finally see her.”

As it turns out, Lizzie’s “Great Game” doesn’t much affect her relationship with her parents, but it does have a hugely negative effect on her psyche. In college, she falls madly in love with a fellow student named Jack, who finds out about her high school exploits through an article her parents wrote for Psychology Today. When he leaves town and she never hears from him again, Lizzie is obsessed with finding him, even after she marries a perfectly wonderful dentist named George. Every time she’s in a new town, she can’t help checking the phone books to see if Jack’s listed. (This habit makes a certain degree of sense in the early chapters of the book, set in the late 80s and early 90s, but for goodness’ sake, the Internet made it almost ridiculously easy to find people by the end of the century; Google was around in the late 90s, and Facebook by the mid-2000s.)

I can sympathize with the pessimistic, book-obsessed Lizzie—temperamentally, I’m quite a bit like her, while my own husband is more of a George—but by the end, which seemed awfully abrupt, I was somehow left wanting more. However, the book, with its many short chapters, is a quick and easy read, and I enjoyed the way that Pearl namedrops a lot of authors, poets and book titles throughout.

I'm quite minimalist: constantly purging, trying to be conscious of what I choose to bring into my life, letting go of books immediately after reading them.

I just started a new job and have intentionally only taken things to live at my desk as they seem essential. One of those few things I've set out is my Nancy Pearl Librarian Action Figure. Though I don't always love the same books she does and don't always agree with her assessments, she has been someone I've admired for a long time. I'm quite sure I once saw her on a ferry between Seattle and Bainbridge and just about lost my shit.

All of this as a preference to say that it's bittersweet (emphasis on the bitter) that I finally stopped reading her fictional debut in large part due to always trying to adhere to Nancy Pearl's 50 Page Rule.

Touchstone (an imprint of Simon & Schuster) offered George as an advanced reader's copy and I immediately agreed to read and review. Unfortunately, even though the book is only 288 pages long, I find myself three weeks after starting it and a day before the release date (tomorrow, September 5th), only 39% of the way in. I was complaining to my boyfriend about this; that while I found parts of it enjoyable that I'm not compelled to return to it, he said, with confusion, "But isn't she the one who taught you not to do this?"

George & Lizzie starts of particularly weak, as if Pearl started the novel not quite having found her voice, and then strengthened, but never went back and edited that early weakness. Although it did all pick up for me, which is why I made it as far as I did, I very much unfortunately am ultimately stopping due to the plot being so loosely structured and never really understanding or identifying with the Lizzie's motivations.

Although I'm disappointed that this is the case, to be quite honest, I gave George significantly more time and effort that I might have any author unknown to me, thus breaking Nancy Pearl's own rule for Nancy Pearl's sake.

I liked enough of it that could potentially see at least trying her fiction again but with much wariness.

So it took me a long time to get into this book, and for most of it, my rating would have been 2 or 3 stars. I don't care for Lizzie, and she only slightly grew on me over time. When I was younger and single, it used to really piss me off to see really high-maintenance women end up with the nice guys, who were solid, treated them well, and put up with their mistreatment. (Now that I have one of those guys, and age and life has made me more high-maintenance than I used to be, maybe I don't mind as much as I used to.) But as the book progressed and the damage done to her by her parents was revealed, I sympathized with her more. I'm still not sure about what we're supposed to make of her high school experiment, and whether we're supposed to believe she was permanently scarred by that too, which is why I would have given this book a lower rating. But I liked the ending and the story line itself (even though it was based in Ann Arbor) and so it grew enough on me to warrant the 4-star rating. This author should both keep her day job (for NPR) and keep writing (because she's decent at it.)

I received an advance copy of this book from NetGalley and the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

I started reading this book. After three chapters I just couldn't get into it. Reading some of the reviews maade me decide this book was not worth my time and I gave up on it. I must say there are very few books I do not finish. Because I haven't read beyond three chapters, it would be unfair for me to give it a star rating, it unfortunately since the review is not accepted without a star rating, I am giving it two stars.

(2.5) Oh how I wanted to love the debut novel by one of my literary heroes: super-librarian and book recommending machine Nancy Pearl. There are some endearing characters and enjoyable scenes in this tale of an odd couple’s marriage, but in what was likely a desperate wish to avoid being boring (just think about how many novels she’s read in her lifetime, and how many of those could have been disappointments or even duds), Pearl has too often chosen to be edgy rather than sweet, and experimental rather than thorough. So instead of giving us a traditional tour through George and Lizzie’s family history, growing-up years, courtship and marriage, we get titled fragments that jump back and forth in time but do, ultimately, fill in a rough timeline, although the chronology can be a challenge to pinpoint.

George is a dentist with an “untroubled heart” who later earns a measure of fame for motivational speaking; Lizzie is a literary dabbler who was raised by unfeeling psychologists and lost her true love after admitting to a series of sexual mistakes in her high school years. Perhaps Pearl hoped to tell an empowering parable that counters slut-shaming, but it’s as hard for this reader to forgive Lizzie her romantic failings as it is for Lizzie to forgive herself. There’s just no wiggle room here for understanding why Lizzie does what she does, and Pearl so gleefully describes it all with F words that it feels distasteful. Her/Lizzie’s dutiful research into football hardly helps, instead making this seem like a weak imitation of John Irving. (Also somewhat reminiscent of A Spool of Blue Thread.)

The writing is notably poor in the earliest sections, where the attempt at a breathless, chatty style – “Anyway,” “what the hell,” “Weird!” – is a distraction. At the risk of sounding unkind, I would also tend to echo Lizzie’s note to Jack: “YOUR PARENTHESES MAKE ME FEEL LIKE SLITTING MY WRISTS.” And I spotted a few seeming anachronisms, such as “bling” appearing in a shop name in 1992 and characters communicating largely by phone and letter in 2000, when e-mail should already have come to dominate. The characterization is good with the exception of Lizzie’s parents, who are relentlessly described as “automatons” and never given the chance to grow out of their typecasting.

Of the title characters, George is much the more sympathetic, and Lizzie’s final epiphany, in which she decides to join George in choosing happiness, means that he wins. The Christmas sequence with his family in Tulsa is the best thing about the book; the next best thing is the references to Lizzie’s reading and the books she buys for other people. You can see just how much fun Pearl had with these little asides: it’s what she’s good at, after all, and probably what she should stick to.

Thanks so much to NetGalley, Touchstone and Nancy Pearl for the opportunity to read and review this book.

As stated in the title, this is the story of George and Lizzie. As unlikely a couple as could be - George was raised in a perfect, close family while Lizzie was raised mostly as a psychology experiment by her two professor parents. Lizzie gets into a relationship with George cautiously, one foot in and one foot out, because she can't let go of her past. Her secrets threaten the relationship at every turn.

The book was written in an interesting way, tying in Lizzie's past and football notes in between chapters. Until I got used to it and figured out all the players, it was a tad confusing to me in the beginning. The end redeemed the book for me. I thought the writing was great but Lizzie's character was a bit much and the fact that George stayed was pretty amazing.

3.5 stars - an interesting read.

George and Lizzie is an interesting novel to review. There is a lot of ground that is covered that revolves around Lizzie, her high school experiment, and her continued search for the college boyfriend that left her because of it. Both temper and restrain her ability to fully devote herself to her husband, George. She is obsessed with finding the college ex, Jack, who vowed to love her always but left her instead. Even if she was to find Jack, she has not planned what exactly she would do.
Reading snippets about the unaware participants in her experiment are amusing, especially coupled with some of the jobs they later have.

Color me disappointed in this messy, confusing, irritating first novel from Nancy Pearl. Disappointed in the characters, who were supremely unlikable. Disappointed in the plot...wait! What plot? I prefer books a little more linear and much less avant garde. This will likely be adored by the quirky high school set. Just not for me.

Review sent privately to publisher, due to content.

I love Nancy Pearl on NPR and I thoroughly enjoyed GEARGE AND LIZZIE. Beautifully written, with characters you will root for (although the strong desire to give Lizzie a good slap arose more then once). Poor Lizzie has terrible parents: both psychologists who completely ignore her except to study her like a pinned bug. No wonder she falls for George's wonderful family; they give her the nurturing she has always craved. Unfortunately, Lizzie can't forget her lost love and spends WAY too much time pining for him. George is a sunny, thoughtful man and his trajectory will certainly surprise readers. Quirky, heartwarming and fun, GEORGE AND LIZZIE is sure to delight.

I have no idea what I expected from Pearl's first novel, but I don't think it was this. There are some things I probably should have expected - perfect wording, multi-dimensional characters, and a vague feeling of general pleasure at sitting engrossed in a book. Neither George nor Lizzie are the most likeable people, yet it is so easy to get invested in their lives. Truly, this was brilliantly written and I would have loved to give it at least 4 stars, but personally I just found Lizzie's big secret a bit implausible (at least I was never convinced at the reasoning behind the actions that led to the secret) and I also felt like she turned it into a bigger deal than it needed to be, as far in the past as it was. (This is the best I can do without spoiling, although I guess you do find out pretty early in the book. Still, a book for lovers of words.