Glassworks

By: Olivia Wolfgang-Smith

Narrated by: Katherine Littrell

Length: 14 hrs and 16 mins

Publisher's summary

In 1910, Agnes Carter makes the wrong choice in marriage. After years as an independent woman of fortune, influential with the board of a prominent university because of her financial donations, she is now subject to the whims of an abusive, spendthrift husband. But when Bohemian naturalist and glassblower Ignace Novak reignites Agnes’s passion for science, she begins to imagine a different life, and she sets her mind to getting it.

Agnes’s desperate actions breed secrecy, and the resulting silence echoes into the future. Her son Edward tries to make his way as a man of faith, but he struggles with what he does not understand about his parents, the meaning of family, and the world at large, while working at a stained-glass studio. In 1986, Edward’s child Novak—just Novak—is an acrobatic window washer cleaning Manhattan high-rises, a compulsive caretaker soon caught up in the plight of Cecily, a small-town girl remade as a gender-bending Broadway ingenue. And in 2015, Cecily’s daughter Flip—a burned-out stoner trapped in purgatorial cohabitation with her ex-girlfriend and a bureaucratic job firing cremains into keepsake glass ornaments—resolves to break the cycle of inherited secrets, reaching back through the generations in search of a family legacy that feels true.

For fans of Mary Beth Keane, Min Jin Lee, and Rebecca Makkai, Glassworks is a profound and moving debut novel about family in all its forms.

©2023 Olivia Wolfgang-Smith (P)2023 Dreamscape Media

Critic reviews

"Katherine Littrell gives an operatic and beautifully detailed performance of this gorgeous debut."—Audiofile Magazine

I loved it

I thought this book was so observant and beautifully written. I loved how it explored intergenerational misunderstanding and trauma- each generation perceives the world through a lens tinted by their own experiences, and fails to see that the previous and next generations have needs different than their own. We all have such limited insight into the people around us and what shaped them. And we feel misunderstood, forgetting that we need to explain ourselves to other people. “It was exhausting, how people didn’t know things unless you told them. How you didn’t know things unless you asked. Unless you paid attention to the answer.”

I enjoyed getting to know the very different characters and entering their minds and worlds (Flip was my surprise favorite). I think you will like this book if you like to savor language and character building.

The main downside is I want more

I feel like the stories only stopped because they caught up to the present day. Maybe there will be a second volume set in future eras (although that would be odd considering how reality-grounded this was). I enjoyed all the segments, but Novak (1986) stood out as a highlight while Edward (1938) started to lose me a bit toward the end.

meh

I am getting tired of stories that don't go anywhere, and have no real ending.