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Very Cold People

A Novel

ebook
5 of 11 copies available
5 of 11 copies available
NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE • The masterly debut novel from “an exquisitely astute writer” (The Boston Globe), about growing up in—and out of—the suffocating constraints of small-town America.
LONGLISTED FOR THE PEN/JEAN STEIN BOOK AWARD • “Compact and beautiful . . . This novel bordering on a novella punches above its weight.”—The New York Times
Very Cold People reminded me of My Brilliant Friend.”—The New Yorker


ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker, NPR, Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, Good Housekeeping

“My parents didn’t belong in Waitsfield, but they moved there anyway.”

For Ruthie, the frozen town of Waitsfield, Massachusetts, is all she has ever known.
Once home to the country’s oldest and most illustrious families—the Cabots, the Lowells: the “first, best people”—by the tail end of the twentieth century, it is an unforgiving place awash with secrets.
 
Forged in this frigid landscape Ruthie has been dogged by feelings of inadequacy her whole life. Hers is no picturesque New England childhood but one of swap meets and factory seconds and powdered milk. Shame blankets her like the thick snow that regularly buries nearly everything in Waitsfield.
 
As she grows older, Ruthie slowly learns how the town’s prim facade conceals a deeper, darker history, and how silence often masks a legacy of harm—from the violence that runs down the family line to the horrors endured by her high school friends, each suffering a fate worse than the last. For Ruthie, Waitsfield is a place to be survived, and a girl like her would be lucky to get out alive.
In her eagerly anticipated debut novel, Sarah Manguso has written, with characteristic precision, a masterwork on growing up in—and out of—the suffocating constraints of a very old, and very cold, small town. At once an ungilded portrait of girlhood at the crossroads of history and social class as well as a vital confrontation with an all-American whiteness where the ice of emotional restraint meets the embers of smoldering rage, Very Cold People is a haunted jewel of a novel from one of our most virtuosic literary writers.
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    • Library Journal

      September 1, 2021

      The Rome Prize-winning Manguso, best known for her aphoristic 300 Arguments, offers a debut novel that limns the limits of small-town white American life. Not postcard pretty like some other New England towns, chilly Waitsfield, MA, is often snowbound, and for Ruthie it's a place where her high school friends meet violence and her own immigrant past is a source of shame. Can she ever get away from the "very cold people" around her?

      Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

    • Publisher's Weekly

      October 25, 2021
      A solemn yet deeply empathic bildungsroman, Manguso’s debut novel (after the essay collection 300 Arguments) centers on a girl whose life unravels in a fictional Massachusetts town. The only child of a European Jewish mother and an Italian father, Ruth has spent her entire youth in Waitsfield, a place defined by its colonial histories and class differences. She shares stories of her personal and ancestral history in abbreviated accounts, delving into how the traumas of poverty pervaded every aspect of her and her family’s life, as well as how the abuse that Ruth and her friends continuously suffered at the hands of their parents, teachers, and caretakers impinged on their ability to imagine a life outside of Waitsfield. The vignettes don’t have a lot of momentum, but as a whole they render a sweeping view of a girl’s troubled coming-of-age with a solemnity that both wonders at and highlights the heartbreakingly persistent hope that lies at the core of Ruth’s life story. Manguso’s complex work will inspire reflection. Agent: PJ Mark, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc.

    • Booklist

      January 1, 2022
      There is no warmth in Waitsfield, Massachusetts, a colonial town that's as forbidding as the cold that permeates Ruthie's house in its poorer neighborhood. This gritty coming-of-age tale follows friendships, crushes, and fantasies through Ruthie's teenage years as she navigates neglect at home and a tumultuous relationship with her mother. Known for nonfiction books such as 300 Arguments (2017), Manguso paints a haunting portrait of innocence lost, with snippets of prose that gradually evolve from brief paragraphs to pages. These first-person windows into Ruthie's upbringing, though initially jarring and seemingly mundane, masterfully unveil the tragic and disturbing fates of girls in Waitsfield. When Ruthie begins to recognize an alarming pattern of abuse even in those closest to her, she wrestles with the dangers of silence and the violence against young girls by men, from tennis coaches to family members to strangers on the train. Confronted by secrets spanning generations, she must find a way to escape the town's dark history. A gripping debut novel on the vulnerability of girlhood for readers who enjoy steady but intense storytelling.

      COPYRIGHT(2022) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

    • Kirkus

      Starred review from February 1, 2022
      A woman recalls her girlhood and adolescence through the lenses of family dysfunction and sexual assault. The first novel by acclaimed poet and critic Manguso is a bracing coming-of-age story and master class in controlled style. The narrator, Ruthie, recalls growing up in Massachusetts on poverty's edge. Her father is snappish and distant; her mother's quick to judge and deeply narcissistic. ("The doctor said, Oh, she's beautiful, when he pulled me out, and my mother had thought he was talking about her.") As the story moves into Ruthie's teen years, the damage to her self-esteem begins to show: She's anxious around anybody she sees as her betters (which is almost everyone) and sees bullying and ostracism as her due. The plainspokenness of her voice--recalling early Ann Beattie and the dirty realists--at once underplays the tension and suggests just how tightly coiled she is. By the time she enters high school, she's exposed to a new ecosystem of sexualized mistreatment, from inappropriate touches to rape. Police officers, gym teachers, and family members all seem to be wired for exploitation. So her self-harm intensifies (she pulls out her eyelashes) alongside her awareness not just of sexual abuse, but of how common it is among those around her, which leads to the novel's powerful conclusive revelations. Manguso is a lovely writer about unlovely things--her previous books were built around lyric essays on suicide and autoimmune disease, and here she depicts her protagonist's quiet agony with a poet's eye. ("My shame fell from the ceiling like snow.") But the elegance doesn't diminish the emotional impact of her story and the journey of becoming mature enough to understand transgression, be horrified by it, and search for a means to escape it. A taut, blisteringly smart novel, both measured and rageful.

      COPYRIGHT(2022) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

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