It's a nice read, but you keep expecting more action, actually. Some climax, some real drama in a dramatic half century. Or maybe, the life of boomers in the USA was very different from what I saw among my elders in Europe? The heroes - and especially Mona Glass, the title-giving heroine - are much too superficial and traditional for my taste. Single mom and eternal love affair, focusing on working out (on the tennis court) and first and foremost obsessed with her son, even at the age of 30 (the son!)? Well, that reminds me more of the awareness age (aka the 2020s) than the 1970s/80s/90s. Okay, the protagonists of the story, Ross Barkan wants to tell, try to do things differently, and clearly different from their parents. As do their children. Mostly. But at the end of the day, they lead the same more or less bourgeois life in a well-knit social safety net. Although the world around them is falling apart: 9/11, Covid, the everyday crime and hassle in a metropolis - NYC - and the potential retreat to the suburbs, Florida or Long Island. Who am I talking about? Meet Mona Glass, who at college falls in love with her professor Saul. Both embark on a livelong affair and eventually have a son, named Emmanuel, who is clearly overprotected by his mother. Mona works as a freelance photographer for the print media and loves to play tennis. Saul is a public servant, working for a politician (I think, a Democrat, but that's not really important). He is married to Felicia, has a daughter, Lenore, who is following her daddy's footsteps becoming a lawyer,. Her brother Tad - what a name! - however is kind of lost in life and tragedy. Saul, for cowardice (or love?), never leaves Felicia. Their marriage can only end, once the wife decides to go. But even this does not trigger any real drama. Neither does the (re-)appearance of "Vengeance", a vigilante or any of the dramatic events marking the last decades of the 20th and the first decades of the 21st century. The publisher's description labels Ross Barkan's book a "soaring, heartbreaking novel", a "tour de force of ambition and grace" and "a great American chronicle". This is definitely exaggerated, given the fact that I repeatedly and especially at the end of the story had the feeling that the "Glass Century" is a work unfinished, more a sketch than a ready product. So, my conclusion is: It's a quite nice read, but don't expect too much. It's entertaining, and I guess some might find elements of their own lives in those years in or between the lines, but quite a step away from high-quality literature. 4 stars, nevertheless, because it was nice enough to have me read through the end and write a few lines as a comment. Thank you Netgalley for this preview e-book in exchange for an honest review.

The synopsis of this book brought me in but the story itself was a little too slow and also clunky. It felt weighed down a lot but the author telling us what going on the NYC at the time in a very wikipedia paragraph kind of way. I love a New York novel but this one just wasn't doing it for me. Also I felt like I ever really knew who was talking, which led to some confusion on my end.

I'm not going to lie, the timing of me reading this book probably had a lot to do with my lack of enjoyment of it. There was also a lot going on and at times it was hard for me to follow. The dialogue portions, especially when they got a little long, didn't have any indication as to which person was speaking. Frankly this book just made me work too hard. 2.5 stars.

This is how my mother would have described the main characters, Mona and Saul, in this novel: “Terrible people in soul-sucking circumstances.”
I could have been a hugely sympathetic reader of this story. I was a young woman living in Manhattan in the 1970’s and 80’s. I lived with a guy who worked for the City and was as politically connected as Saul was. I knew women who played tennis and competed as viciously as Mona. (Tennis was very big in those days.) I wrote for the Village Voice. I knew a wide range of characters in the city at that time.
When I read the publisher’s description of this novel, I couldn’t wait to read it. Only a few pages in, I realized it was probably not for me. Nevertheless, I persisted, hoping I would be rewarded with a story that would win me over. It didn’t happen. I just never cared about how things would turn out for Mona and Saul. Then the ending just… ended.
The author seems to have a close working relationship with AI. Paragraphs were plopped in to tell (not show) about what was happening in NYC at a particular time. There was a *lot* of telling.
Here’s a “compare and contrast” exercise. Read Cynthia Weiner’s A Gorgeous Excitement. Set in the UES of the 1980's, this is gritty, realistic writing with unsympathetic characters. Yet we feel the empathy she has for them Also, Weiner didn’t have to rely on flat AI descriptions of the times and places. She was there. I was too. She got it right.
Here's a quip that’s as mean as those that are thrown around by the characters in this novel: This book is all ambition, no craft.

Thanks to Tough Poets Press and NetGalley for this ARC of 'Glass Century' by Ross Barkan.

This is the kind of book I really love. A big, sweeping novel that spans generations and presents the ever-changing New York City (and US) through the focus of a small and interconnected set of characters.

Beginning in the early 1970s and continuing through Covid and its aftermath in the early 2020s the narrative hangs on the extra-marital relationship between Mona and Saul and brings in a tight group of friends and family and the story is woven in around their professional and private lives and experiences. Although I didn't live there in the 70s I did live in NYC in the late 80s, 90s, and 2000s and I felt that the people, places, and experiences were really well drawn and believable.

The Twin Towers of the WTC are characters in their own right throughout the novel through their existence and then their absence and play a crucial role that you begin so see coming as the author teases the strands of the story together.

It's a very New York novel and, for me, that's always a good thing. I could see this being a superb streaming service series.

Congratulations to the publisher and author and, coming from a small independent press, I hope this book gets the attention it deserves.