Kate Greathead's The Book of George is an introspective look into George's life from his teen years into his late 30s and how he too fell victim to a cycle of stagnation and self-sabotage, shaped by both societal expectations and his own inability to adapt. Greathead’s portrayal of George is empathetic and frustrating. He is not a bad person, nor is he without intelligence or ability. However, his stagnation and lack of ambition become increasingly difficult to witness.

I won't lie—I struggled with how to rate this novel. The beauty of The Book of George lies in its subtle, nuanced writing. Greathead masterfully captures the small disappointments, the gradual retreat from the world, and the passive acceptance of mediocrity with remarkable precision. I found myself disconnected from George’s journey, yet completely engrossed in the way his story was told. The third-person narration is poetic and captivating, a stark contrast to its withdrawn and frustrating protagonist. While I admired the craftsmanship of the novel, I ultimately found myself disengaged from its central character’s trajectory.

In the end, The Book of George is a novel that lingers—whether in frustration, reflection, or reluctant admiration. It captures a modern existential crisis, reflecting a growing demographic of men who struggle to transition from youthful potential to realized success.

A captivating and thought provoking story that explores the complexities of identity, family, and self discovery. I loved the humor and I think everyone knows a George.
Many thanks to Henry Holt & Co and to Netgalley for providing me with a galley in exchange for my honest opinion.

Oh, my goodness, I've met so many Georges in my life! Lucky for me, I never married him. Your heart will go out to Jenny, even as you wonder why she puts up with him. I love the person Kate Greathead has created with her character, George. So irritating, so self-centered, but still you can't quit watching him. Like a bad wreck, but with a sense of humor.
Thank you to Henry Holt & Company for an ARC in exchange for my honest review.

It was just a blah book. Characters really never developed, plot lines and characters just dropped, and there was really no redeeming qualities at the end of the book. George was absolutely insufferable, but Jenny wasn't any better than George. In a strange way, I wanted them to end up together.

Other than that, really thought this book was going to be funny, but it was more frustrating. Find this book at your local library to check out and read, if you really want to read it.

This one was hard to get into! I was a deep character introspection on male millennial George and his perpetual failure to thrive in adulthood after a promising and doting childhood.

There is so much cringe here. So much. I deeply enjoyed the writing style, development, themes, but this was NOT a fun hang. George is deeply unlikeable throughout the book, and even his biggest cheerleaders will scream in frustration for his life choices.

However, I think for many that enjoy contemporary literature with biting cultural commentary will enjoy this novel.

Thank you Netgalley and Henry Holt for the review copy of this novel!

Thank you to Netgalley and the Publishing Company for this Advanced Readers Copy of The Book of George by Kate Greathead!

The book fell short as it wasn’t into enough. I realized I didn’t have a want to read a book about a guy.

Oof. I don’t mind an unlikable character but they at least have to be interesting. There is nothing at all interesting about a man spinning his wheels for hundreds of pages. I do like the author’s prose and would check out her other books.

I really wanted to like this, but I struggled to get through it. The character felt too pretentious, and the plot felt flat to me.

I got such mixed reviews on this. I have dated a George so I almost felt perfectly victimized by it but was also so bored as I felt I was reading my own life.

This is certainly a complex and polarizing novel. My friends and I constantly discuss how women are born accepting pain, and men find their own ways to try and experience it, then shout “I’m the victim.” George is that man. He’s mediocre but he’s been told his masculinity is all he needs. I understand the attempt at the dissection here, but I don’t think people are ready or even care for that dissection, as we’re tired of hearing about mediocre men. I personally think the execution could’ve been a lot better.

"The Book of George" by Kate Greathead is a Character Study of Millennial Masculinity!

When I began this immersion read, I thought I'd made a horrible mistake by requesting "The Book of George". Seriously. I even set it aside for two months deciding if I wanted to pick it up again. Eventually, I did and you might say, George began to grow on me.

George is quite a character and you may recognize him. He's good-looking, smart, witty, and has great potential but he's his own worst enemy. He has tons of opportunities but motivation has never found a home in his life. He's happy one minute, sullen the next, snarky, makes snide remarks, pushes those closest to him away and if anyone knows what a mess he is, it's George. And, he's the first one to admit it...

So why did I enjoy the heck out of this story?

I love the satirical side of this characterization. Let's face it, George is not a star but you can't help rooting for him. For some crazy reason, you care about him. He's that relative, friend, or co-worker who does something eye-rolling or off-putting that you explain away by saying, "Oh, that's just George, being George!" Right?!

Do you recognize George now?

The best of my immersion read was the audiobook and the excellent narration of Blair Baker. She hit all the right notes in all the right places and she nailed the voice of George. I think it's also worth mentioning that this is a book about a man named George written and narrated by women. They brought George to life in a way that made him feel familiar to me.

I enjoyed "The Book of George" much more than I thought I would when I began and I know this won't be a book for everyone. After all, George is an acquired taste. For me with its satiric humor and ridiculous George moments, it was just what I needed! 4.25⭐

Thank you to Henry Holt and Co., Macmillan Audio, and Kate Greathead for a DRC and an ALC via NetGalley. This is my honest and voluntary review.

Congrats to Kate Greathead, whose very funny novel The Book of George manages to ask and answer: what if you had a book kind of like The World According to Garp, except Garp’s mother was terrible, and Garp started off okay and then fell lower and lower as his laziness and obtuseness undercut his privileges—also what if he had a cancer scare based on a tiny ball of toilet paper getting stuck in his bum? A different flavor of the toxic masculinity satire of Rejection and, not coincidentally, The Great Man Theory.

The authorial voice made the story a simple read. However, the actual story was a bore. Things happened to George, and the passiveness of his character made me uninterested in his story. I couldn’t care to finish it.

This was an interesting book that described the life of a man named George from childhood to his late 30s. George is ultimately a sympathetic character but can often be thoughtless (sometimes even downright rude). Greathead does a nice job of walking that line.

You have probably known a George at some point in your life. An attractive, intelligent, good-humored guy with a ton of potential…if only he could muster up some motivation and get out of his own way. In The Book of George, Kate Greathead paints an intimate portrait of millennial manhood through a series of vignettes following her eponymous George from childhood into his late thirties. George grows up with every advantage and opportunity but is the very definition of “failure to launch”: He spends years working on a half-formed novel, content to let his mother, and then his girlfriend Jenny, steer the course of his life (and appreciating them not at all for it). George is infuriating, not just to the women in his life (and to the reader), but also to himself. He’s depressed and brooding, faking it through life but not sure he’s ever going to make it – and never quite managing to care enough to do anything about it. It’s hard not to want to punch him, but it’s also hard not to root for him.

The Book of George is a thoughtful character study, bitingly funny and full of meaningful observations about modern manhood. Greathead has an obvious talent for writing and characterization; whether or not you personally know a George, the characters in this book will feel all too familiar. If you enjoy character-driven narratives that reflect the best and worst parts of the human experience, give The Book of George a try. Thank you to Henry Holt & Co. for the complimentary reading opportunity.

Books are not read in a vacuum. Therefore, your engagement and enjoyment of one is affected by your mood, daily life, and experiences. This book came right after I read another about a hapless, immature young man, and honestly I just couldn't take any more. I applaud the courage of the author to give us a character front and center that would be difficult to like on the surface, but one we end up rooting for.

Published by ‎ Henry Holt and Co. by October 8, 2024

Domestic comedies appeal to me more than domestic dramas, if only because I would rather smile than cringe. The Book of George is an appealing blend of comedy and drama, although the emphasis is clearly on comedy.

As the title implies, the book follows a man named George. The story starts when George is 12 and ends when he’s 38. In George, Kate Greathead created a harmless and hapless character, one who is sullen, inconsiderate, and self-indulgent, an ideal protagonist for a domestic comedy. He isn’t as outrageous as Ignatius J. Reilly, but he shares some of that iconic character’s laziness, indifference to appearance, and ill-timed farting.

Like Ignatius, George lives at home with his mother, although only for parts of the story. George’s mother Ellen kicked his father Denis out of their Manhattan home when George was fourteen (Denis was dipping into Ellen’s trust fund to feed his shopping addiction). George does not see him often because, like most things, paternal visits feed the anxiety and depression that will characterize George’s life.

George attends college in Connecticut. He writes poems in a half-hearted effort to find an identity, but (despite having one published in a campus literary journal) abandons writing after concluding that’s he’s aping the style of David Berman. At a party to celebrate his poem’s publication, he realizes that “his own cohort’s lack of a group identity suddenly seemed pathetic. What did George and his friends have in common beyond being lumped together in the same dorm when they were eighteen?”

Random chance can produce friendships as strong as any other, but it doesn’t occur to George that he would need to develop a passion for something and join with people who share that passion if he wants to share a group identity. George’s search for an identity, as an individual or part of a cohort, becomes the novel’s continuing theme.

When a mysterious mass moves over his head one night, George views it as a celestial sign and decides to major in philosophy. He’s drawn to Schopenhauer, whose mother regarded him as “irritating and unbearable” despite his good heart. George is much the same. Perhaps for that reason, he believes that Schopenhauer wasn’t the “deeply cynical pessimist” that history has judged him to be. George recognizes his own cynical pessimism and sometimes makes an effort to change, but he also feels a need to be true to himself, even if his self isn’t someone he likes.

Having a degree in philosophy qualifies George to get a job as a waiter. He isn’t competent but he meets a waitress named Jenny who plans to attend law school. While they are dating, George begins working for his uncle in the financial industry, a brief career that gives George further opportunity to sit in judgment of the rest of the human race. The other traders focus on getting rich during the week and partying on weekends. George concludes (perhaps wisely) that they are not his people, but what group of people would claim Geoge as one of their own?

George maintains and on-and-off relationship with Jenny for more than a decade after college. More than once they break up and reunite. George’s inability to commit remains a barrier to a lasting relationship. In Jenny’s view, George’s greatest character flaw is “his absentminded disregard for others, his resistance to doing anything that posed the slightest inconvenience to him.”

When she eviscerates George’s character, Jenny hopes he will defend himself, but he tells her she’s right and that she deserves better. That George won’t stand up for himself makes him even less appealing to women, a fact that will be apparent to the reader even if George remains indifferent to how others perceive him.

The turning point in their relationship occurs when George and Jenny go on a road trip. They spend some unplanned weeks with a fellow named Dizart who lived with George’s parents for a time during his childhood and may have been having an affair with his mother. Dizart encourages George to take up writing. When George heeds his advice, the reader wonders whether he has finally found a passion that will motivate him to get out of bed (as opposed to antidepressants that don’t change his mood but rob him of erections).

George believes Jenny takes his depression personally, but there are many other aspects of George’s personality that trouble Jenny. She scolds him for poking holes in people rather than building them up. “It makes you feel better about yourself,” she tells him. “George couldn’t dispute this. He did not want to be such a person.” Yet change doesn’t come easily. It isn’t clear whether George will be a better person by the novel’s end.

None of this seems funny, but Greathead finds humor in George’s droll reactions to the world he inhabits. He attends a pre-wedding celebration and considers “this idiotic aspect of American culture: the aggressively self-celebratory nature of marking ordinary milestones as if they were some kind of hard-won victory or unique life accomplishment.” He returns to live with his mother, where he is soon joined by a pregnant sister who can’t handle her husband’s presence in her home. Asked to watch over a woman’s baby for a short time, George finds after a trip to the hospital that he is ill-equipped for parenting.

George stumbles through life, finding and quitting jobs but never finding one he likes. His best moment comes when he is cast in a Superbowl commercial that takes advantage of his grumpy face. If failed relationships and family deaths are excluded, his worst moment comes when he is bombarded with judgmental emails from strangers who mistake him for his namesake uncle, an English professor who lost his job due to relatively minor incidents of sexual harassment. Judging and condemning strangers is a widespread hobby in the age of the internet.

The novel ends as postmodern domestic novels do, abandoning their characters mid-life without resolving their issues. The novel’s interest lies in its characterization of George of a man without direction who suffers from deficient introspection. Notwithstanding George’s degree in philosophy, he seems uninterested in examining his life and finding ways to change. He has a fairly easy life but can’t appreciate his good fortune. He doesn’t realize that women regard him as handsome, that he might be able to exploit the acting gig he lucked into, or that he has benefitted from at least modest privilege associated with white New Yorkers who get carried through life by friends and family members.

Making fun of people might be mean, but readers can take a guilty pleasure in laughing at George as he drifts from one circumstance to another. George might be right when he says that he doesn’t deserve Jenny, a woman who is light years more advanced in the art of social interaction. Yet George is far from evil. Like Schopenhauer, he has a kind heart even if his attitude is insufferable. When George commits an unexpected act of kindness near the novel’s end, it does not signal a change but a moment in which George reveals a part of himself that he usually conceals. George’s character traits make him an interesting and sympathetic person, one whose life is worth a visit by readers who are looking for a chuckle.

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"The Book of George" attempts to explore deep themes of identity and self-discovery but ultimately falls short. While the premise has potential, the execution feels lackluster, with a meandering plot that often loses focus. The characters, particularly the protagonist, lack sufficient depth, making it hard to connect with their struggles. The pacing is uneven, and many scenes feel drawn out, failing to hold the reader's attention. The writing is occasionally engaging, but the overall narrative feels disjointed and underdeveloped. While the book has moments of insight, it doesn’t fully deliver on its promise, leaving much to be desired.

While I did like this book a lot, I didn't really see the revelatory qualities in it that so many reviewers and readers are touting. I thought it was incredibly well written, seeing as such a hopeless and annoying main character would normally become utterly intolerable after just a few chapters. Greathead absolutely conquered something there. But it also spoke to the uselessness of so many men in this world these days, and how they're only as strong as the incredible women who inexplicably stand beside them.