Cobble Hill is a great read from the author of the "Gossip Girl" series. It is about a group of families all living in an area of Brooklyn - and how their lives and families intertwine. The characters are all interesting and likable and the plot is very fun with twists and turns. I felt like I really got to know the characters and the neighborhood description was very realistic. The book really kept me engaged - I read it all in one day - I couldn't put it down because it was so much fun. I highly recommend this novel. Thank you to the publisher, Simon and Schuster, and NetGalley for providing me with an ARC in exchange for my honest review.

First of all, thank you to NetGalley and the publisher did the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I typically enjoy stories where the lives of the characters intertwine and eventually come together in on culminating event. Cobble Hill is much like that — minus the culminating event. And honestly, minus any sort of climax at all.

The story follows the lives of several people who all live in the same neighborhood. I don’t know what annoyed me more - reading about Roy’s shitty book he was writing or trying to figure out the point of Mandy faking MS or what the hell the deal was with Tupper and Elizabeth. It was all just very bizarre.

COBBLE HILL is a sheer delight! It follows the comings and goings and relationships that form between neighbors in the charming Brooklyn neighborhood known as Cobbler Hill. Cobble Hill is made of a fabulous cast of characters. There's Roy, a famous British novelist who has been going through a very long dry spell, his lovely wife Wendy, who wanted the move to the States, hoping that the move would reinvigorate her life (but now wonders if it was a mistake) and their teen-aged daughter, Shy, who finds herself out of place in her new school. Their neighbor is Stuart Little, former rock star is trying to manage fatherhood of his five-year-old, Tim, who is a precocious pyromaniac.. His wife, Mandy, has taken to her bed and says she has MS but is secretly just tired of life. But they all come together around Peaches, the lovely school nurse and sometime barkeep, who is a huge Stuart Little fan. She is also pulled into Roy's orbit when he is looking for a neutral reader for a new, truly bizarre, novel. Both Stuart and Roy find themselves somewhat besotted by Peaches and the plot comes full circle when Peaches' son, Liam, a tongue-tied nerd, fall madly in love with Shy. This was such a fun and surprising read and it kept me glued to the pages. This is one that I just didn't want to end.

I was delighted to receive the ARC for Cecily von Ziegesar's upcoming novel, Cobble Hill. I went into this one expecting Gossip Girl for adults, but I found was a more of a neighborhood ensemble novel, like Jonathan Vatner's Carnegie Hill or Candace Bushnell's One Fifth Avenue. Cobble Hill's in Brooklyn, so these neighbors are all in separate houses, not in the same building, creating a wonderfully gossipy, interconnected setting more like in Abbi Waxman's Other People's Houses, or Rosie Millard's The Square.  I'm realizing I read this genre a lot, so maybe my next roundup post will be books about neighborhood secrets and affairs.

The characters of Cobble Hill are all a bit over-the-top, in delightfully Brooklyn-creative ways. The novel takes us into four families: a former pop star and his former model wife, a magazine editor (kinda) and her novelist husband, an artist who works in lava and fake blood, a designer who makes, uh, surveillance equipment? creepy manikins? sex toys? all of the above, really. Next to the wealthy creative types are the struggling Brooklyn creatives, a school nurse who's also a drummer and her music-teacher husband.

I loved how dramatic the secrets were, with spouses pretending to have a debilitating disease, disappearing for months at a time,  pretending they haven't been fired, cheating, stealing, lying, etc., etc. Mandy, an ex-model, feels tired, heavy, and lazy. So tired and lazy that she has a bed moved into their living room, and pretends she's been diagnosed with MS. Somehow readers are led to this with almost sympathy and understanding for her extreme lie. Of course this is a horrible lie, but haven't we all said "I think I'm coming down with something" as an excuse to lie in bed and watch trash TV? Somehow, this ridiculous and outrageous lie seems like someone a real person would do.

When Wendy gets abruptly demoted from her upscale magazine editor's role to a maternity leave coverage on more of a middle-class imprint, she doesn't mention it to her husband. And she keeps not-mentioning it. Again, we're somehow led to this massive secret with understanding, it's barely even lying when her husband Roy doesn't pay much attention to the things she does say.

In Cobble Hill, British author Roy Clark has written a rainbow of similar novels. Orange is the most popular one,  although it seems like no one has ever read it all the way through, not even his wife, Wendy. He's at work on his new book, Red, or maybe Gold, or maybe Red and Gold, questioning whether his new work -- which rambles into questionable sex-in-space scifi pulp territory -- is too much of a departure from the rest of the rainbow series.  I couldn't help comparing this to the departure from Gossip Girl and It Girl found here in Cobble Hill.

But it's not a total departure, is it? Because Gossip Girl begins with a sharp eye for the fashion and customs of a certain group of Manhattanites, and then softly exaggerates the highs and lows, until it's less a manners novel than a manners  fantasy. That's the feeling in Cobble Hill, too only this time with the focus on Brooklyn creatives instead of prep school heiresses.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me an advance copy of this book in exchange for an honest review!

If you like character-driven novels in which the plot unrolls like a runaway spool of thread that you can't predict, then this is a good choice to pick up. The synopsis gives little away but provides astute teasers for each of the characters we follow in the book. At several points in the story, I had no idea where the plot was going, but I was oddly okay with that. The characters are fascinating and compelling, and the narrative structure and pacing keep everything moving along efficiently. It was easy to get sucked into this book; highly recommend for an amusing weekend read!

Very witty and fast paced. I enjoyed watching the characters grow! I found it a little slow to begin, but soon became very engaged with the story.

I struggled with this book, as I didn't find that there was much of a plot throughout the story. While I like novels that are either character or plot driven, Cobble Hill did not provide enough character development to compensate for the lack of a storyline.

With this being said, I really enjoyed the setting of this novel. Cobble Hill provided the perfect context for a cast of wildly different characters. I would recommend this book to people who enjoyed Modern Lovers by Emma Straub, as I found many parallels between both of these books.

As a Brooklyner by way of Staten Island I do have some affection for the little drops of borough ness that make their way into this book. It was a quirky read that I got through on a day, but I didn't actually love any of the characters or feel invested in them or their plotlines but I did just keep reading bc it flowed really well and was an easy read. Once you get passed the vast wealth and artsy absurdity of the people that make up this small group they just become regular humans that are flawed, bored, and trying not to be both. My biggest annoyance though was the characterization of Mandy; the endless calling her fat (except her husband who called her chubby and Peaches who called her curvy). I couldn't tell if the author was trying tow a statement or not but it was distracting (besides that womans absurd plot line).

For a character-drive novel, I didn't feel like I connected with a single one of them. I felt like many of their stories were not as fully developed as they needed to be by the end of the book (what is the point in Elizabeth/Tupper as characters??) and there are a lot of larger issues that are brushed over very quickly (Black Ryan? The pyrotechnic son? Shy's crush on her teacher?). By the end of this book, I really wasn't sure what had even happened. It generally fell very flat for me and I couldn't connect with it at all.

Disclaimer:
I’m compelled to begin this review by stating that I am unequivocally biased towards liking this novel. For one, I used to live in/around Cobble Hill, Brooklyn. I recently moved away and still experience nostalgia for the neighborhood. Second, I spent my early teens devouring von Ziegesar’s Gossip Girl novels on family beach trips. I have deep roots in both the author herself and the setting of the book.

Review:
As expected, I really enjoyed Cobble Hill (3.5 stars rounded up to 4). The titular neighborhood becomes more than just a setting - it lingers in the background of every scene and feels like an omnipresent, comfortingly familiar character.

Speaking of characters, there are A LOT of them in Cobble Hill. The novel is really a character study more than a plot-driven narrative. The author does a fantastic job of introducing her readers to most of them in enough detail to bring them to life, giving us an understanding of their motivations and what makes them tick. Each character is unique and most have a realistic mix of quirks, flaws, and redeeming qualities (there are two exceptions, mentioned below).

Roy Clarke, a successful novelist struggling to write his next work, is probably my favorite character. He’s kind and funny and easy-going. Like many of us, he struggles with imposter syndrome. He’s someone I’d love to be friends with IRL. I suspect he’s von Ziegesar’s favorite as well. At one point, he muses that his prior novels have all been “chatty and witty and not about anything, really, just people from deranged families, talking,” which struck me as a funny/meta/Easter egg reference to the author’s Gossip Girl novels.

The primary reason I didn’t all-out love this book is the utter lack of remorse, redeeming qualities, and comeuppance for two characters. First, Mr. Streko. He’s the high school Latin teacher who Roy’s daughter, Shy, has a crush on. We find out that Streko thinks Shy’s “da’ bomb” - creepy situation. When Streko gets called out by Roy, he gives Shy the silent treatment both in Latin class and as the coach of her table tennis team. His behavior is so unprofessional and inappropriate, yet he’s still allowed to hang around the group and comes to the Clarke’s Bonfire Night party.

Second, Mandy Marzulli-Little. She gets into a funk, gains a little weight, falls deeper into her funk, gets lazy, and refuses to get out of bed. To justify her laziness, she pretends to have MS. Yes, she pretends to have MS. She lies to her husband and her son and everyone she knows about her “illness”. Both her family and the neighbors go out of their way to help and make her more comfortable and she just goes with it. Eventually, her lie is revealed and… no one seems to care. It comes out at Bonfire Night, so most of the group are drunk and/or high, but still. Her actions are despicable and it didn’t sit right that she never feels sorry or receives any sort of negative reinforcement for her actions.

Thanks so much to the author, Cecily von Ziegesar, the publisher, and NetGalley for the advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.

Fun read for the grown-up teenagers that loved Gossip Girl. I remember Gossip Girl being the first "mature" book I read as a kid, so couldn't resist revisiting Ziegesar as an adult. I was slightly disappointed, but I think some will enjoy this easy read.

Thank you NetGalley for the ARC of this novel. A fun read that lets you move in to a neighborhood in Brooklyn and the intersecting lives of these eclectic characters. Parts of it were a little to far fetched for me to connect with but I enjoyed some of the characters stories.

Cobble Hill is a character-driven novel that intertwines the stories of four Brooklyn couples in their trendy neighborhood. While there is not a lot of action in the story until the last third of the book, the characters' quirks and interactions have a "Central Casting" quality to them: the famous writer, the performance artist, the ex musician, hot school nurse, hipsters, etc.; I can imagine the book being produced into a streaming show quite easily. Cecily von Ziegesar brings the world of Cobble Hill to life!

Advanced reader copy provided courtesy of Atria Books via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Available October 2020.

I couldn't help but fall in love with this quirky novel chronicling a year in the life of 4 very different families living in Cobble Hill. We follow along as an aging rock star and his bored and confused wife, the local school nurse/drummer and her musician husband, an imported author and his magazine editor wife and the local off-her-rocker artist and her husband live their lives that sometimes intersect and sometimes don't. There was a kind of pure poetry to these pages, and a sense that I couldn't hope to predict what would happen next. Even though not all of the characters were entirely likable, I still managed to care about them all.

I wasn't extremely satisfied with the ending and definitely wanted more. It felt deliberately yet deliciously abrupt as I'm certain that the author intended it to be. I was so engrossed in all of the story lines that I couldn't help but be a little saddened at all of the ends that were left loose and the unanswered questions that I had.

Compulsively readable with interesting and bizarre characters and plots, Cobble Hill was a joy to read! I will definitely be recommending this to fans of general fiction since I couldn't put it down. My thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for providing me with this copy in exchange for my honest review.

This story follows 4 married couples in the Cobble Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn, as well as their children. All of these couples have their own fair share of problems that, honestly, are too extensive to get into in a short recap/review. But suffice to say that each of these couples are very unique and bring their own VERY different problems to the table.

I was a big fan of Cecily von Ziegesar's Gossip Girl series when I was in high school (and, of course, the TV show), so I was excited to see that she was writing a novel for adults. While this was a significant departure from the Upper East Side world of Gossip Girl, I found that I still very much enjoyed the writing style. It kept my attention, and I just kept wanting to know more and more about each individual character. I loved this book and will be recommending to everyone I know - but especially those who already know of Cecily von Ziegesar's work!

This book has many tropes and devices of fiction that I love: multiple storylines that intertwine; a book-within-a-book; secrets people keep from their families. However, something was missing from this story and I did not enjoy it. I didn't hate it, but I also didn't really like it. The story fell flat, and left me feeling, just, "meh." Some of the characters were unnecessary (Tupper? Why?), and most of the time I wanted to be reading the book that the author character was writing instead of THIS book.

I had never read a Cecily von Ziegesar book, but when I read the description for this one I knew I wanted in. Does it feel tone-deaf at this moment to read a book about white, wealthy, priveleged people who are still unhappy? Yep. Did I enjoy this book? Also yep.

It's escapist fun. I buy these characters are real people that live and work in Cobble Hill, a neighborhood full of quirky rich people.

A truly entertaining story that is thought-provoking as well. It centers around four families, each of which have their own set of characters with multiple problems and issues, so there is a lot going on. Definitely keeps you turning the pages. I look forward to recommending this to readers.

Have you ever finished a book and just been like what?🤨 that is how I felt after reading this. I was left scratching my head wondering what I just spent all this time reading. I am really really sad. I wanted to love this. I wanted the same magic I felt when I read her other books Gossip Girl or It Girl. None of that magic was in this. It was a bunch of loosely connected characters who were just bizarre and not in a charming way, they also weren’t really relatable or had any depth. These characters were connected by their neighborhood but it all felt forced and superficial. In the end... I’m not sure what I was supposed to get out of it because I didn’t get anything.

I absolutely loved this book! Cobble Hill tells the year long story of interconnected neighbors in an affluent NY borough (grown up Gossip Girl fans rejoice!). They way Cecily von Ziegsar wove them all together paints such a beautiful and realistic peek into how our little lives can play out in big ways. This book is more about the cast of characters than any one plot line. An eccentric artist, a tween pyromanic, an English author, a lazy liar, a bored rockstar, a flirtatious school nurse, and many more tell an interconnected tale of discovery, loss, inspiration, and medical marijuana.