US pub date: 4/9/24
Genre: contemporary fiction, literary fiction
Quick summary: A blended family (plus friends) spread from Tahiti to New York City struggles with life at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

LOST AND WANTED is a favorite of mine, so I had to read Freudenberger's latest. Plus this cover is so cool! There are a lot of characters and perspectives in this book, and it's not always clear who is speaking. I had a bit of trouble with this at the beginning, but as I settled into the book, it became easier to keep everything straight. This novel has a profound sense of time and place(s) - the anxiety of the early pandemic days, a city gone quiet, and the beautiful waters of Tahiti. I enjoyed seeing the characters react to their circumstances, and Freudenberger did a great job bringing it all together at the end.

If you enjoy quiet, reflective books, I would recommend this one.

Thank you to Knopf for providing an e-ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I loved this fresh novel that takes place in French Polynesia and New York City and even incorporates the COVID lockdown in a way that works. Pia lives with her mom who studies coral reefs. Pia is sent to live with her dad and his new younger wife, Kate in New York City and then COVID hits. Pia and Kate are forced to be in close proximity while Pia's dad, a doctor, is busy at the hospital trying to save lives during the pandemic. Pia ends up meeting one of Kate's students (at a Staten Island public school) and their lives later collide. Pia is a profile of privilege while Kate's student Atheyna is trying to do online school while taking care of her younger nephew.

This book has elements of environmentalism (save the reef) but I thought they were well done and not preachy.

Hard to read a covid book as a New Yorker. I think in a few years I would like it! Kate, pregnant and teaching from home while her husband - a doctor is helping to address the pandemic.

It is a beautiful portrayal of covid but feels claustrophobic at times. A complex novel about relationships and families - if that is your jam, this is for you!

I read the first half of The Limits over two long reading sessions. The premise sounded like exactly my type of story, but the more I read, the more disconnected I felt. None of the three main characters drew me in and like the family, the story felt very disjointed. I finally had to call it quits and so, am only sharing my thoughts here.

Set during the pandemic, this book follows multiple interconnected storylines showing different character's perspectives of how the pandemic affected them. It was interesting to see how the interactions between characters changed from one character's perspective to the next, especially with how Athyna and Pia viewed their friendship. Overall, a well written character piece with some of the storylines more gripping than others and the plot did get a little convoluted with so many elements involved. Most of the characters are unlikeable but then they are struggling with a difficult time. This book heavily features COVID and readers who are looking to avoid that may want to skip this one.

This is my second Nell Freudenberger novel and I really like the way she writes. The Limits is a blended, modern family Covid drama and follows the stories of a family trying to co-parent, manage careers, and a teenage daughter trying to figure out her place in the grand scheme. I like the added element of science as a character in this story. Those who enjoy books revolving around family dynamics and relationships should give this book a read.

Thank you to Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor and NetGalley for this ARC.

I really liked some components of this book. The scenes in Tahiti, the description of dives, the time frame of the covid pandemic, the climate references. The teen age daughter of divorced parents and her angst was well developed and the storyline with a high school senior caring for her nephew was compelling. However when an attempt to mesh the two characters didn't quite work and seemed forced. There was something to dislike and Like about all of the characters. Still ruminating on this one but overall a complex timely novel

Copy provided by the publisher and Netgalley

The Limits by Nell Freudenberger is a multi-character novel set during the COVID-19 pandemic. The novel is well written but something just didn't fully click for me. Maybe it is because I was most interested in Athyna's character rather than the family of Pia, Steven, and Kate. I also wasn't deeply interested in the scientific storyline in Tahiti. All that said , the writing is very solid and I enjoyed reading it so it's a bit of a mixed bag for me. 3 1/2 stars rounding up to 4 due to the quality of the writing.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an advance copy of The Limits in exchange for an honest opinion. The Limits is available now.

The Limits is set amongst the onslaught of COVID-19 pandemic as a teen and per split family navigate her coming of age, the pandemic, careers, and family changes. What drama occurs when teens lie and hide things from their parents? What drama ensues when parents prioritize their careers and give their teens a bit too much freedom. How do babies change things? Environmental factors? Friends, old and new?

I really liked the dual settings of NYC and Tahiti amongst the pandemic... two very different COVID experiences. As in real life, there was an underlying sense of dread... from both COVID and poor choices. Somehow this story left me feeling both depressed and full of hope... so I guess this would be a good book for realists!

Thank you to NetGalley and Knopf for the opportunity to read and review this ARC.

This book was not an easy read. It comes from many different perspectives and it is not always clear at the beginning of a chapter which character we are hearing from. There was a lot of scientific material, which is usually no problem for me, but I don’t feel like it was presented in a clear and understandable way. The story seemed to have very divergent storylines, and I expected them to come together but never felt like they did. I also didn’t feel like I learned a lot about the characters and what motivated them to do what they did. I am finding myself drawn to books about the pandemic and peoples’ different experiences during those days, be it fiction or non-fiction, and that kept me interested in reading.

There have been a few novels out that deal with life pre and post Covid. Nell Freudenberger's novel is one of the strongest. I truly felt at times that I was back in that world. It discusses issues of race, our environment and the things that makes us human and the importance of family through it all. It takes place in Mo'orea and New York. The main characters are Pia, David, Kate and Athena. What happens is their worlds collide and things we beleived before may no longer hold true or were they feeling we were trying to deny. The book tackles the big issues that came out of of covid. There is so much in this novel to like but some may not want to revisit this time in history. I would use the expression you don't know what you're missing if you pass on reading this novel. It's a slow boil but one you will savor til the last page. Thank you to Netgalley and Knopf for the read!

I feel like I just finished one of the best pieces of writing this year and wish I had read more slowly. A definite masterclass in what is being categorized as eco fiction. My interest was in the documenting of contemporary family relationships circa 2020. I was most interested in the intersection of the women’s lives and the palpable distancing of emotional connection and couldn’t decide if this was class, blended family or culture of the day
driven. I would have liked to have a more in depth look at each women’s inner experience.. Very timely given the coral bleaching and issues of underground mining. Felt like two distinct storylines Natalie and the science..Pia, Kate, Athyna navigating pivotal life transitions in the vagaries of pandemic New York…. this for me took alway slightly from the overall experience.

Set during the early days of the pandemic, The Limits is a story of 4 different women--a marine biologist who lives in Tahiti, her daughter Pia, who is struggling with teenage angst, Kate, who is married to Pia's dad, and Athyna, who is one of Kate's students. I struggled to keep them all straight--plus there are some subplots that further muddy the narrative. It wasn't until about halfway through the story when the characters connect that I was able to stay focused instead of trying to figure out who was who. Any one of these subplots could have been a separate book. The writing was beautiful, but this complex story was a bit much for me.

This family drama set during the initial stage of the pandemic in Tahiti and NYC centered around 5 main characters and their actions during the time when it started taking hold in the US.
Stephen is a cardiologist, married to Kate, a high school teacher, newly pregnant, divorced from Nathalie, a marine biologist working to restore coral reefs in the Pacific that were damaged by nuclear testing and climate change. Stephen and Nathalie's daughter, Pia is a 15 yr old high school student who has returned to NYC from Tahiti to attend a private school. Athyna is a 16 yr old student who is the primary caretaker for her 4 yr old nephew Marcus.
I found the character development to be superficial and while the characters were described, their interactions and responses to each other lacked depth. Pia was intelligent, and typically teenage, but her snarky, rebellious, and lying behaviors were annoying to me. She insisted that a man in Tahiti twice here age was completely in love with her (really???). Athyna seemed to have a lot of anxiety and indecision, and very little positive force in her life.
I didn't think that Nathalie was fleshed out, although her emails to Stephen were blunt. However, her research was explained in (too much) detail and it felt to me that the author was trying too hard to make points against climate change. I am a C-diver and I found this part completely irrelevant to he story.
Overall the difficulty that I had with the book was the changing countries, timelines, and characters without clear transitions. I also found the pacing to be slow with a lot of repetition, which I didn't think added to the overall story.
I received a complimentary ARC of The Limits from NetGalley and am expressing my own opinions.

Well-written family drama that takes place during the pandemic. The narrators shifted among five different characters and it felt like there was a bit too much going on for me. Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the ARC.

I had a hard time reviewing this book, separating the things that I should have realized about it, having read the summary and the things that legitimately bothered me about the book. Since it can be difficult to do that, while I flipped back and forth between two stars and three, I went with three.
I did not realize the extent to which the pandemic was so front and center in the book; that one of the characters was a doctor, treating patients with COVID. This made it a hard read for me because during the height of the pandemic I had trouble reading at all but when I resumed, I tended to avoid anything about it. In fact, this may be the first book I have read that has taken place during the pandemic which was so prominent that it seemed like another character.
What drew me to the book initially was one of the settings of the book. It was Tahiti. Even with the pandemic, the promise of a tropical paradise was hard to resist. And the book delivered on that. There were descriptions that made my eyes water. Along with that there were scientific details about diving and research which should have interested me but went on a little too much. Not all of the book took place in Tahiti; some of it was here in New York City. In fact, somewhere in the middle were scenes that took place in Prospect Park and in my local subway station and I am not sure how I felt about that.
However, I know that I felt confused through much of the book. It went back and forth between countries, characters and times and all of this was hard to follow. I found parts of it slow and a bit tedious. While it got better toward the end, something almost happened and then didn't happen and I must confess I felt a bit cheated.
Finally, I had a hard time connecting to the characters. They were not entirely unlikeable but I couldn't really like anyone, not even the teacher (another thing that drew me to the book).
Others may like this book better; looking at other reviews, I seem to be an outlier.
Thanks to NetGalley and Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage and Anchor for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.
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A thoughtful and thought provoking novel, The Limits puts you in the shoes of wildly different people all navigating through the pandemic and issues of their own. The characters are multi-layered and well crafted but what impressed me most was the author’s ability to give each character a “genuine” voice and perspectives. There are a few spots where the story seems to truncate and the plot slows to a crawl but this book is definitely worth the push through to the end.

It's 2020 in New York, and things are not going especially well. Kate is preparing to parent a baby but not especially prepared to suddenly parent a stepdaughter she's never met. Pia, said stepdaughter, would rather be back in Polynesia. Across town, Athyna is logging in to Kate's English class when she can, but her attention is divided, as she's suddenly been given most of the care duties for her young nephew. And half a world away, in Mo’orea, COVID has barely registered for Nathalie, Pia’s mother, other than to help determine which part of the world Pia will be living in.

"The Limits" is set during the relatively early days of COVID, partly as a plot device (among other things, COVID gets Stephen out of the apartment and makes Athyna's walls close in on her) and partly as a reminder of different shades of privilege. (It is not lost on me that it *is* lost on Stephen that his surprise at Athyna being so quiet is—in the context of the scene—implicit racism; nor is it lost on me that it is, again, lost on Stephen that a teenage girl might be uncomfortable being told to spend the night in the house of a man she’s never met.) It’s well written and thoroughly thought out, though readers should go in expecting a relatively slow read. I was a little surprised by how little interaction Kate in particular ends up having with the rest of the characters—they’re all operating, on some level, on their own planes. But I love the push-pull between how we see Kate and how we see Nathalie: neither is the villain in the other’s story, but they’re each a little skeptical of the other, and the way they perceive themselves is contrasted by the way they see each other.

I read this for the description, but rereading that description now, I'm not sure how well the content of the book actually matches it. The description feels aspirational, maybe, in retrospect? Or perhaps like a "find the six items that are different in these pictures" game. The description calls Athyna's nephew a toddler, but in the book he's four (still in need of a ton of attention, but no longer a toddler); in the description, Pia and Kate are in "near total isolation" together, except book-Pia spends as much time as possible outside the apartment, so they rarely interact; and so on. Not quite wrong, and not bad, just...a little off-kilter.

This is a book in which not all that much changes for the characters as they make their way through a few months of COVID-induced uncertainty and events both predictable and unpredictable in their own lives. Maybe they come out a little more jaded or with their eyes a little wider open, but on the whole of it the characters come out of the book as the same people with the same views that they went in with, just with an extra few months of experience. A solid read, if not one that left me deeply invested in what becomes of the characters after the end of the book.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.

Many thanks to NetGalley and Alfred A. Knopf Borzoi Books for gifting me a digital ARC of the new book by Nell Freudenberger - 4.5 stars!

Taking place in both Tathiti and NYC during the first year of Covid, we meet Nathalie, a French biologist obsessed with saving coral reefs; her ex-husband, Stephen, a cardiologist in NYC; and their precocious teenaged daughter, Pia. Nathalie sends Pia to NYC to live with Stephen and his new wife, Kate, ostensibly to attend her old (better) school. When Covid hits, Pia and Kate find themselves alone and resentful of each other, especially now that Kate is pregnant. Kate is a NYC public schoolteacher, and we then meet one of her students, Athyna, caring for her nephew almost full time and trying to finish her senior year remotely and apply for college.

One of the biggest challenges of Covid was the forced isolation. This book really takes you back to that time and highlights society's innate need for social interactions, while also showing our shared connections and hope. Conversely, Covid also highlighted our class differences - those who could afford to escape big cities, pay tutors in pods, who had insurance and those who didn't have childcare, safe jobs, or homes. This story is told with those themes strongly running throughout, as well as all the family dramas. I thought the writing in this book was wonderful, although I definitely had to use my Kindle translation feature a lot!

I love climate fiction and The Limits is a must read if you do too. All three characters were richly developed and this sent me into an existential crisis, but in the best way. The senses of place are also rich and add to a phenomneal reading experience.