The tumultuous life of a rock band member is contrasted with the life of her mother who up and left her years ago. Theirs is a nonexistent relationship until time intervenes to try and prod them into facing each other.
I voluntarily read and reviewed an advanced copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

This is a novel about motherhood in all of its forms, and how important it is for women to control whether and when they become mothers. Each character rejects and chooses motherhood in different ways, with different support systems, and with very different approaches. Whittall does a great job of revealing each woman's reasons for abortion, and how they got their abortions, emphasizing the need for safe and legal abortion on demand. This would be a great selection for book clubs and for parent-child reading.

It was one of the best reads of 2021. Zoe Whittall makes you feel like you're actually living inside along with the characters and experiencing what they are experiencing.

As this story begins, it’s 1997 and Missy Alamo is a bit of a wild child at the age of 22, she’s the only female member of an indie rock band, who is at the moment stuck alone in a Vancouver hotel room. She’s missing the high from being onstage, the adulation. Now she’s alone, pregnant, with a throbbing ankle, with a hangover. Since her mother left without much of a goodbye, Missy isn’t interested in repeating the pattern. She picks up the newspaper left in the room and sees the headline Sex Scandal at Ashram, along with a photo of a group of ‘hippie ladies’ - a term I’m pretty sure, even at the time, would not have been used. She scans the photo and finds her mother, Carola, among them. Her mother, who walked away from Missy’s father and Missy when she was a child for another life. Later on, Carola’s mother-in-law and Missy’s grandmother, Ruth, enters this story.

The story is shared among these three women, their stories are as different as they are. Missy has never understood her mother’s reasons for leaving, but loves her grandmother. Their stories are messy. Life is messy.

Unsurprisingly, this is a story that focuses on the emerging themes associated with each of these generations. Perhaps the ‘hippie generation’ didn’t invent the concept of ‘free love’ but it is a term attributed to them. Their parents, slightly less likely to have had sex before marriage, let alone multiple partners before marriage. After marriage? That’s another story. The desire, or lack of desire to have children, and the responsibility that comes with parenthood. Gender identity/fluidity is another theme as the years pass and we enter a more current time.

These eras, these individual stories are shared separately but the voices aren’t distinct, which works better at times than others. Sometimes it flows beautifully, more often - for me - it muddles things, leaving me perplexed.

At the heart of this story lies the central concept that life should be lived life on one’s own terms, but each generation creates their own terms, rejecting former mores. That’s how life evolves. It’s messy.


Pub Date: 14 Sep 2021

Many thanks for the ARC provided by Random House Publishing Group - Ballantine

The Spectacular has several wheels turning at once: those of the three generations of women the story follows. It feels primarily like Missy's story, the protagonist punk rock musician who we meet when she's at the brink of success in her rebellious 20s. It makes sense that her mother and grandmother are woven into her story as our other narrators. Whittall's execution of this is masterful: she manages to give Ruth and Carola/Juniper their own voices, backstories, and depth of personality while adding to Missy's story (as well as each others).

The story I read felt slightly different than the summary blurb (on the advanced reader's copy I received from the publisher), but I thoroughly enjoyed it. It's a little difficult to pin this story down without spoiling too much of the family's experience. Each woman led very different lives, yet they were brought together by basic tenets of family and the struggles we often face behind closed doors. The women struggled with sexuality, relationships, family, finding yourself- a variety of experiences we've all shared despite their differences.

The Spectacular was a slowly addicting read, full of conflicts and love, succeeding and failing, and reexamining the failures we've all made in a new light. The relatable, complex characters carried their difficult stories not with ease but with strength, which gives any reader something to hold onto.

The best recommendation that I can give to a work of fiction is the feeling I get when I finish the book that I haven't read a novel. With this book chronicling the lives of three generations of women, I felt like I was reading real reporting about what happened to each of them and had to check to make sure that it really was fiction. The three women are all flawed in interesting and complementary ways: grandma has adjustment problems as an immigrant from Turkey, mom doesn't want to be a parent initially and leaves her daughter in grandma's care to go find herself, and the daughter has so many issues that drive the narrative that to document them here would spoilt the book. The author tackles some very real issues: gender identity, understanding how to live with others, finding your calling and your passions, etc. I really enjoyed this book, even as a white cis male. There are many familiar chords that were struck while reading its pages, and I wanted to meet these three women in real life when I was done. Highly recommended.

This book was nothing like I had expected it to be, but I enjoyed it. The story follows three generations of women who struggle each in their own way, with all the things that womanhood brings... marriage, babies, self care etc. I felt like I took away a huge lesson from The Spectacular, in that no matter when we as women are/were navigating through life, we all have the same struggles. Every generation thinks the one before just doesn't get it, but that's not exactly true.

The author did such a terrific job of presenting these women and the complexities of their relationships. Bravo!

One family. Three generations of women; mother, daughter, granddaughter reveal the intricacies and struggles of navigating through personal choices, romantic relationships, life styles and motherhood.
These multigenerational women lead their lives very differently, an octogenarian involved in an affair with a neighbor who is recently diagnosed with a terminal illness, one who is a free spirit jumping from commune to yoga cult and the youngest a musician on the road with her band enjoying the seduction of success and multiple lovers.
The journey and the dimensions of each character is portrayed with the precision perfect prose of Zoe Whittall. Magically, these bold and brave women seem somehow as familiar as they are familial. Although flawed, they were strong and determined to deal with the themes and challenges of being a woman and reshaping it in their own unique form.
Thank you NetGalley,Zoe Whittall and Harper Collins for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

This book had all the elements of a potential new favorite novel: nineties setting, indie rock, cults, communes, family relationships,. elderly women. Love all of that. I mostly enjoyed this book too but there were parts that bothered me. What was the point of the mother going to the police about her guru? It explained why she left Missy behind at the commune/culty place at 13 but they really didn't explore it. I think it would have been enough just to say she left for another hippy group or yoga group or whatever rather than set up a criminal case (and talk to a cult expert) and then sort of drop it.

I wish we had learned more about the grandmother, her parts were too short. It was also a little confusing because her paternal grandmother was the one in the book but they talked about her maternal grandmother more often.

Spectacular presupposes its own expectations. It would be hugely ironic and quite sad for the novel with a. title like that to turn out to be a middling mediocrity. And sure enough, it begins spectacularly…boldly, excitingly, it promises all the spectacular things, poised on a brink of awesomeness like Missy, the protagonist (well, one of them) herself.
It begins like this…a 21 year old musician about to set off on tour with her punk band tries desperately to do the responsible thing and have her tubes tied. Because she wants to party her way through the tour like a proper punk, because she doesn’t trust the partners she (quite indiscriminately) chooses or herself or condoms, because she hasn’t had the kind of nurturing experience with her own mother and it’s left her convinced she shall never want kinds of her own. Missy has many very reasonable reasons.
And because it’s 1997 and because our society is then as it is now very patriarchal and sexist and because America in many ways has always been true to its puritanical ways of yore no one is willing to help her and she is constantly and consistently told she will later change her mind and give in to her biology.
And so Missy goes on the tour with her tubes free and untied and promptly gets knocked up.
Meanwhile her storyline alternates with that of her estranged mother, Carola, whose hippieesque ways (as a form of her rebellion against her own strict and repressed mother) have led her from city life to a commune to a yoga cult. Carola is an interesting character, ebcuase although she did become a mother at a young age and in spite of her many reservations, she has never quite taken to it naturally and eventually left it altogether, her marriage, her commune, her daughter…in what seems like a profoundly selfish act which in fact for her was pure self preservation.
And then there’s a sidebar of Ruth, Missy’s father’s mother, whose life is briefly (page percentage wise) recollected as she is getting ready to wrap it all up and let it all go. Ruth has had been married to a blatant cheater and her only joy in life has been her son and then his daughter, Missy.
So the first section of the novel presets the stage for a fascinating multigenerational drama of unhappy marriages and challenging motherhoods. It’s so well written and engaging that you don’t even need to like or relate to characters to completely immerse yourself in their journeys. Plus it has such a strikingly original and (it shouldn’t be but it is) bold message of…maybe not everyone is cut out to be a mother and that’s ok.
And then the novel skips time, 16 years of it, and becomes every clichés out of the women’s fiction playbook Sure, it’s more hip, more queer, more challenging than most of those, but the bottom line is babies, babies, babies. Everyone wants then, everyone needs them, they give life meaning in the way no other thing or person can, etc.
It’s almost as if the author just plopped her ovaries on her keyboard for the second section of the book, set her metronome to biological clock and went to town on it. All the originality of the initial premise, all the bold subversive dynamics of it…thrown right out of the proverbial window. It’s so hugely, spectacularly disappointing. And it pretty much eclipses all other aspects of the novel. Which is a crying shame, because it’s so good otherwise. There are such clever parallels between all the female characters in the book, the ways their choices sort of echo each other through the years, from abandoning pursuit of former education to finding love late in life, etc. But in the end, it’s an estrogen party through and through, with diapers all over it.
What began as such a fun and awesome book, because yet another baby book. And this novel will work for you in direct proportion to where you are on the babies subject. Which means for me it didn’t do all that much and certainly not as much as it might have. Loved the writing, loved the character development, didn’t care for the message. But if you’re looking for a perfect Mother’s day read about imperfect mothers, this is for you Thanks Netgalley.

What a tour de force! From page one I was sucked in and it took everything in my bones to not devour this in a short period of time, but savor it. The complexity of the relationships (Missy and Andi/Andy and Missy and her mom) ebbed and flowed beautifully. I highly highly encourage picking this one up once it is published.

This was a miss for me - it’s well-written, with multiple POV’s and interesting characters. (And the cover is gorgeous). But the waffling about motherhood went on and on, and even though I know that happens in real life - how easy it is to become obsessed with a single decision - it made for less than spectacular reading. HOWEVER...if you are a reader wrestling with this choice, as I know millions of woman are, this will be a great read.
Thanks to NetGalley for providing a copy of this book.

Book Review for The Spectacular

Full feature for this title will be posted at: @cattleboobooks on Instagram!

Did not finish this book. Characters were not interesting and the divergent storylines were difficult to follow.

So far everyone else has seemed to love this book, so clearly I'm in the minority here. I got tired of Missy's back and forth about having a baby, and I wasn't particularly interested in Carola's story. I wanted more from Ruth, but sadly it didn't happen. For some reason after reading the current synopsis I thought that this book would be different from what it was.

Kindly received an ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

3.5 rounded up, because I really wish I'd liked this a lot more than I ended up liking it. It starts very strong, and I loved the Missy chapters, but by the end I was just kind of... I don't know, the steam ran out and I didn't really care about anyone as much as I had at the beginning. The excitement dwindled until I was finally grateful to just reach the end. I think one problem was that I felt it skipped too much time at one point, and it never recovered from that fumble. But rounding it up because the writing was good, and the story had potential. I'm willing to concede I just lost interest because of personal taste.

I received an advanced readers copy in exchange for an honest review.

I’ve read a lot of books about fucked up chicks and this one as well crafted without adding anything particularly new to the genre. If you like reading about girls who do drugs and have miserable sex, this book won’t steer you wrong. 3.5 rounded up

Random House Publishing Group/Ballantine Publisher..... Y'all freaking rock my socks!

I have been patiently waiting to get approved for The Spectacular and y'all came through!
Ahhh I'm Like What!!!!! Thank You! Thank You! Thank You! 😘😘😘😘😘

I knew this book was going to be bomb and the bomb it was!
This book is spectacular, in every damn way!

This multiple POV book is just Fab. We see Carola, Missy and Ruth.
My gawd these ladies are a force to be reckoned with..... They are strong ladies.... Flawed, wonderful, strong women. And I just ate these characters up!
But what I loved most was that the writer Zoe Whittall touched on real life situations. That is what drew me in and is never let go! That makes for such an awesome read!
Amazing job with this book right here! And I seriously can't thank y'all enough for giving me the chance to read and review!

This is one I'll be buying a copy of for my bookshelf! 😍