American Pop

A Novel

By: Snowden Wright

Narrated by: Robert Petkoff

Length: 12 hrs and 19 mins

Publisher's summary

The story of a family. The story of an empire. The story of a nation.

Moving from Mississippi to Paris to New York and back again, a saga of family, ambition, passion, and tragedy that brings to life one unforgettable Southern dynasty - the Forsters, founders of the world’s first major soft-drink company - against the backdrop of more than a century of American cultural history.

The child of immigrants, Houghton Forster has always wanted more - from his time as a young boy in Mississippi, working 12-hour days at his father’s drugstore; to the moment he first laid eyes on his future wife, Annabelle Teague, a true Southern belle of aristocratic lineage; to his invention of the delicious fizzy drink that would transform him from tiller boy into the founder of an empire, the Panola Cola Company, and entice a youthful, enterprising nation entering a hopeful new age.

Now the heads of a preeminent American family spoken about in the same breath as the Hearsts and the Rockefellers, Houghton and Annabelle raise their four children with the expectation they’ll one day become world leaders. The burden of greatness falls early on eldest son Montgomery, a handsome and successful politician who has never recovered from the horrors and heartbreak of the Great War. His younger siblings Ramsey and Lance, known as the “infernal twins”, are rivals not only in wit and beauty, but in their utter carelessness with the lives and hearts of others. Their brother Harold, as gentle and caring as the twins can be cruel, is slowed by a mental disability - and later generations seem equally plagued by misfortune, forcing Houghton to seriously consider who should control the company after he’s gone.

An irresistible tour de force of original storytelling, American Pop blends fact and fiction, the mundane and the mythical, and utilizes techniques of historical reportage to capture how, in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s words, “families are always rising and falling in America”, and to explore the many ways in which nostalgia can manipulate cultural memory - and the stories we choose to tell about ourselves.

©2019 Snowden Wright (P)2019 HarperCollins Publishers

Critic reviews

"The House of Forster is built on bubbles; watching each wealth-addled generation try not to blow the family fortune and/or disgrace its name provides not only excellent Southern Gothic fun but a panoramic tour of the American Century." (Jonathan Dee, author of the Pulitzer Prize finalist The Privileges)

Wobbly Timeline

I really wanted to like this book. I found the Forsters interesting and was all in to take the dive into their cola empire. Like others, the rapid time jumping discombobulated me. I don't mind a disjointed time line, but the switches would often feel random. I did listen to the book and often the narrator didn't leave silence between breaks, making it seem like it was all apart of the same thought, when in actuality you were switching perspectives. I wonder if each section focused on a central event, which the time jumps derived from, if that would help the narrative feel more united. Either way, you have to pay attention. Snippets of details are dropped which connect to later stories.

Having just read Malibu Rising this summer, Taylor Jenkins Reid explores a family saga in a similar fashion, but more successfully. I think in part it was due to the main storyline being anchored to the grand Riva party. The reader had a space to ground themselves and gain perspective from the deep dives into the family's past.

American Pop was an ambitious project and you can tell Wright trying to pack the novel with as much detail from the Foresters as he could. With a bit of tweaking it could've been perfect.

Wish I read the reviews before purchasing

The premise of the book is interesting. I simply could not follow the story. The switching back and forth between stories and timelines was just too confusing and not enjoyable. I gave up halfway through the book.

I hated this book!

The story itself was good . The way it was told got on my last nerve! The way the author kept going back and forth in the time lines and going back and forth in the characters drove me nuts!!!

So bad…save the credit

Save your money and the credit - this story is not worth it (or your time)