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You Should Have Known
Author:
Korelitz, Jean Hanff
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Class:
Fiction
Age: Adult
Language: English
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LC: PS3561.O
Print Run: 75000
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ISBN-13: 9781455599493
LCCN: 2013015825
Imprint: Grand Central Publishing
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Pub Date: 03/18/2014
Availability: Out of Stock Indefinitely
List: $26.00
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Hardcover
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Physical Description:
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439 pages ; 24 cm
H 9.5",
W 6.5",
D 1.5",
1.5 lbs.
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LC Series:
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Brodart Sources:
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Brodart's Insight Catalog: Adult
Brodart's TOP Adult Titles
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Bibliographies:
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New York Times Bestsellers List
New York Times Bestsellers: Adult Fiction
Publishers Weekly Bestsellers
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Awards:
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Publishers Weekly Starred Reviews
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Starred Reviews:
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Publishers Weekly
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TIPS Subjects:
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Domestic Fiction
Romance
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BISAC Subjects: |
FICTION / Family Life / General
FICTION / Literary
FICTION / Thrillers / Suspense
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LC Subjects:
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Domestic fiction
Love stories
Man-woman relationships, Fiction
Marriage, Fiction
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SEARS Subjects: |
Domestic fiction
Love stories
Man-woman relationship, Fiction
Marriage, Fiction
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Reading Programs: |
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| Annotations |
| Brodart's TOP Adult Titles | 12/01/2013 |
| Priding herself on the advice she offers women about properly deciphering what the men in their lives are really saying, Grace Reinhart Sachs watches her life fall apart when death and the missing husband she thought she knew send her down an unfamiliar road that leaves her to pick up the pieces with her child as she faces a public nightmare. 448pp., 75K, Auth res: Princeton, NJ |
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| Starred Reviews: |
| Publishers Weekly | 08/26/2013 |
| This excellent literary mystery by the author of 2009's Admission unfolds with authentic detail in a rarified contemporary Manhattan. Therapist Grace Reinhart Sachs is about to embark on a publicity blitz to promote her buzzed-about book on why relationships fail, You Should Have Known. In the meantime, she cares for her 12-year-old son, Henry, who attends the same private school she went to as a child. Grace also treasures her loving relationship with her longtime husband Jonathan, a pediatric cancer doctor at a prestigious hospital. The novel's first third offers readers an authoritative glimpse into the busy-but-leisurely lives of private-school moms. Grace does her best to get along with the school's vapid and catty fundraising committee. She eventually learns that one of the mothers outside her social strata, Malaga Alves, was found murdered in her apartment by her young son. Grace, already tense and sad from these events, becomes more and more anxious as Jonathan, at a medical conference in the Midwest, proves unreachable over several days. The author deftly places the reader in Grace's shoes by exploring her isolation, unease, and contempt for the rumor mill. The plot borders on hyperbole when it comes to upending what we know about one character, but that doesn't take much away from this intriguing and beautiful book. Agent: Suzanne Gluck, WME Entertainment. (Mar. 2014). 448p. PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, c2013. |
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| Journal Reviews |
| BookPage | 04/01/2014 |
| In the latest novel by accomplished author Jean Hanff Korelitz (Admission, A Jury of Her Peers), which shares the title of its main character's book, relationship challenges raise questions of how often we really know what's best, whether living the life we've envisioned necessarily means we're living it right, and how we overlook our instinctive responses to the people we meet. Grace Reinhart Sachs' cynicism toward the wedding industry understandably follows from her work as a couples' therapist. If there were more emphasis on marriage and less on the wedding, she postulates, 50 percent of couples wouldn't get married at all--likely the ones who shouldn't have been together to begin with. That philosophy is reflected in her self-help book, You Should Have Known, in which she argues that many women would have long ago ended their relationships, had they only followed their instincts. Grace is juggling her private practice and her son's New York City private school demands while amping up for the book's release. The fielding press inquiries from Vogue, Cosmopolitan, "The Today Show" and "The View." Then her life takes an unthinkable turn: Her own picture-perfect marriage is called into question. Although she cautions her patients and readers against love at first sight, that was her experience with her pediatric oncologist husband, whom she met during her senior year of college. Grace goes into a tailspin, questioning the man she's known for more than a dozen years, as well as the relationship that defines all her interactions and her very worth as a counselor. You Should Have Known is an insightful, compelling tale sure to provoke reflection. Carla Jean Whitley. 448pg. BOOKPAGE, c2014. |
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| Booklist | 02/01/2014 |
| There is an exquisite but excruciating irony in the fact that Grace's marriage is imploding. The successful Manhattan couples therapist is just about to start the PR blitz for her first book, one that examines the tell-tale, "he's not right for you" signs that, caught early enough, can prevent shaky relationships from becoming emotional earthquakes. Mired in the media whirlwind while working on a fundraiser for her son's tony private school, Grace is only peripherally aware that her husband, charismatic pediatric oncologist Jonathan, is characteristically but frustratingly incommunicado. Then when one of her committee associates is found brutally murdered the same time Jonathan drops off the radar screen, Grace slowly learns that everything she thought she knew about the man she married is blatantly false. Like peeling back the layers of an onion, Korelitz's stinging deconstruction of this marital facade simultaneously reveals the inexorable lies about Grace's supposedly ideal mate. Sensitively delving into the intricacies of self-deception, Korelitz (The White Rose, 2005) delivers a smart and unsettling psychological drama. Haggas, Carol. 440p. Booklist Online. AMERICAN LIBRARY ASSOCIATION, c2014. |
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| Kirkus Reviews | 06/01/2013 |
| Jason Bourne meets Martha Stewart in another of Korelitz's woman-of-a-certain-age-in-crisis dramas. The author's 2009 novel, Admission, is now a film starring Tina Fey. Well, not quite Jason Bourne. But Grace Reinhart Sachs is almost as resourceful. She lives the perfect life--or so she thinks--with a rich, famous doctor for a husband and a satisfying if hurried professional life as a therapist, pop psychologist and now author of a book called, yes, You Should Have Known, a book that's "apparently about to snag the Zeitgeist." With said snagging comes her ascent to public personhood, or, as Grace puts it in psychologese, "[t]hus completing my public infantilization." Her book urges women to take charge and exercise due diligence with regard to potential life mates, though in her own case, she had "absolutely just known, the first time she had lain eyes on Jonathan Sachs, that she would marry and love him for the rest of her life." Mistake. Karma being what it is, it only stands to reason that the perfection of her life--the great kid, happy marriage, stunningly appointed city apartment and country home--will fall apart at the mere hint of scandal. And so it does, so that when Grace discovers that he's not everything that he's cracked up to be--emphasis on cracked up--she swings into action to uncover every dirty bit of laundry that's hidden in that oak-paneled walk-in closet. Korelitz writes with clarity and an unusual sense of completeness; she doesn't overdescribe, but neither does she let much of anything go by without observing it, which slows an already deliberately paced narrative. She is also an ascended master of the psychologically fraught situation, of which Grace experiences many as she stumbles on but then rises above the wreckage of her life. A smart, leisurely study of midlife angst. 686pg. KIRKUS MEDIA LLC, c2013. |
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| Library Journal | 02/01/2014 |
| A successful therapist with her new book, You Should Have Known, due to be published in weeks, Grace is living a life to envy: she's married to an oncologist who loves her, has a son who adores her, and lives in a great apartment in Manhattan. Her son, Henry, attends an exclusive private school, which is in the midst of an annual fundraiser. Grace attends a planning meeting with several moms she already knows plus a new member, Malaga. Imagine the moms' shock when a few days after the meeting, Malaga is found brutally murdered in her apartment. The police question everyone on the planning committee but return to talk to Grace several times. And thus begins the end of what Grace thought was a normal life. VERDICT Korelitz, the author of Admission, has crafted her second novel in the vein of Gone Girl or The Silent Wife; unfortunately, the suspense is marred by the overwritten prose. The book tends to be very New York-centric, so readers unfamiliar with the vagaries of life in Manhattan may find little to enjoy; still, fans of Korelitz's first novel may be curious enough to give this a shot. [See Prepub Alert, 9/30/13.]. Robin Nesbitt, Columbus Metropolitan Lib., OH. 448p. LIBRARY JOURNAL, c2014. |
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| Library Journal Prepub Alert | 09/30/2013 |
| Enthusiasm has been building steadily for this new work from the author of Admission, basis of the Tina Fey film. Happily married counselor Grace Reinhart Sachs is about to promote her relationship book advising women to listen more closely to their mates when she's thrown by the murder of a school mum outside her social circle and the inability to reach husband Jonathan, who's away on business. Has she been failing to listen to Jonathan? A standard setup, perhaps, but Korelitz aims at both mystery and psychological study. With a 75,000-copy first printing. 448p. LJ Prepub Alert Online Review. LIBRARY JOURNAL, c2013. |
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9781455599493,dl.it[0].title
| Review Citations |
| New York Times Book Review | 04/13/2014 |
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