Tom Perrotta

A Rapture-style event takes place and millions of people around the world disappear. There seems to be no rhyme or reason to who was taken and those who remain, the leftovers if you will, are baffled.

The novel focuses mainly on one suburban family’s reaction to the event in the years that follow the occurrence. The husband and wife, Kevin and Laurie, have vastly different reactions. She joins a group of fanatics called the Guilty Remnant, convinced they must abandon their lives and take a show more vow of silence in order to remind people about what happened. Kevin goes in the opposite direction, embracing the community and running for the office of town mayor.

Their college-age son Tom searches for meaning and instead finds the “Healing Hug Movement” led by the charismatic Holy Wayne. Lost in the mix is Jill, their daughter who has just started high school. After losing her friend Jen in the event, she is expected to grieve, but instead finds herself wanting to embrace life. A lack of parental guidance and the bad influence of a new friend leave her feeling empty. She is searching for love and acceptance in the wrong places.

Perrotta has a gift for making extreme circumstances seem relatable. In this case, the rapture serves mainly as a device to allow the readers to dive into a fascinating character study of the effects of grief and shock on people. Everyone has lost someone, even those who are only missing celebrities. This shared grief both unites and divides people. It has created a world filled with lonely individuals, few of which know how to initiate new meaningful connections.

One of the most interesting characters is Nora. She lives in the same town and lost both of her kids and her husband on that fateful day. Unlike some of the other characters, she seems unable to move forward, trapped by her grief and guilt, despite the fact that her life was not the perfect picture others thought it to be.

For me the ending was a letdown. The story just seemed to peter out and that really affected my overall impression of the book. I was just expecting something more and instead it just wrapped up quickly and ended.

BOTTOM LINE: The book might be about an unexplained rapture, but really it’s about human nature, relationships and interactions. The rapture is just used to bring those things into a sharper focus, highlighting the loneliness of our world. It was surprisingly hard to put down. I was a bit disappointed in the ending, hence the lower rating, but still an interesting character study.

“… the gratitude that spreads through your body when a burden gets lifted, and the sense of homecoming that follows, when you suddenly remember what it feels like to be yourself.” show less

When Jimmy is sent an invitation to be a part of an event honoring his late father in his hometown, it sends him into memories of the summer he was thirteen. He was growing up in a working class town in New Jersey in the mid-seventies, when his mother died and his father and older sister disappeared from his life, busy with their own grief and staying away from the house. So Jimmy ends up cruising around at night with a local pothead, and spends his days as an unofficial volunteer at the day show more camp he attended when he was younger, where he is noticed by a girl two years older than him. But along with the loss of his mother, a boy alone faces other dangers that summer. The boy he's hanging out with may only be a handful of years older than he is, but those years matter and there's a reason his new buddy can't find anyone else willing to spend time with him. And the town has always been whites only, so when a young Black man moves in next door, the town is on edge, something that even a thirteen year old can sense.

Few people write as well about being a suburban teenager than Perrotta. His portrayal of Jimmy, with his uncertainty and acceptance of the things happening around him are beautifully evoked, as is what it was like to be a teenager, but too young to drive, in an ordinary town in the seventies, the lack of supervision and the slow realization that the adults are imperfect and dealing with their own problems. It's fun to see Perrotta enjoying the nineteen seventies, from the music playing to the way everyone smoked all the time to the Vietnam War ever present in the background. And Jimmy is a wonderful character. He's aware without being precocious, stuck figuring out things for himself when he really just misses his Mom. The way his family just falls apart in the absence of the person who made it all work felt authentic. And despite the heavy themes running through the story, this is a remarkably enjoyable book to read, whether or not you have direct memories of the time period in question. show less

This was a reread of what should be considered a classic tale of the “drifter” generation: the one that missed the love and peace of the ‘60s but was too old to be the Boomers’ spoiled children.

Dave, the main character, is conducting an aimless life as a guitarist in a wedding band who accidentally becomes engaged to his girlfriend of 15 years, then just as haphazardly begins an affair with another girl weeks before his wedding. Dave can’t seem to feel passionate about anything, show more and perhaps that’s why he has no purpose. But we like him despite that, as well as his cronies in the band, and when they really start to rock together, we are right there with them, asking for just one more song. show less

This is a novel of sadness but I never regret grabbing up anything written by Tom Perrotta. I'm simultaneously listening to Bruce Springsteen's memoir and to be enveloped by two New Jersey lives with a mother dying and an alcoholic father with mental illness is almost too much! Both have shades of the Simon and Garfunkel song "My Little Town", and there's the pervasive miasma that overhangs the Garden State, especially as seen by condescending New Yorkers, also looming large in the Sopranos, show more albeit some twenty years later. Jimmy, now looking back as Jay, a moderately successful YA author, is invited to his hometown for the celebration to honor his late father, the only firefighter from Creamwood who has ever died in the line of duty. It's Jimmy who takes us through the miserable, confusing summer of 1974 when his mother died of cancer and he climbed into a car driven by Eddie, one of the town's "JDs" (juvenile delinquents), who saves him for a while, until another saner savior, Olivia, a girl with a Ouija board, steps forward. However, the underlying racism, which did not factor much into white Jimmy's life until that summer, rears its hideous head, with devastating consequences. This is a rewarding heartbreaker of a novel, in the aftermath of Jay's description: "For a while there, we were a normal family." show less