Worry

A Novel

By: Alexandra Tanner

Narrated by: Helen Laser

Length: 7 hrs and 13 mins

Publisher's summary

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

A "dryly witty" (New Yorker) and "fabulously revealing" (The New York Times Book Review) debut about two siblings-turned-roommates navigating an absurd world on the verge of calamity—a Seinfeldian novel of existentialism and sisterhood.

It’s March of 2019, and twenty-eight-year-old Jules Gold—anxious, artistically frustrated, and internet-obsessed—has been living alone in the apartment she once shared with the man she thought she’d marry when her younger sister Poppy comes to crash. Indefinitely. Poppy, a year and a half out from a suicide attempt only Jules knows about, searches for work and meaning in Brooklyn while Jules spends her days hate-scrolling the feeds of Mormon mommy bloggers and waiting for life to happen.

Then the hives that’ve plagued Poppy since childhood flare up. Jules’s uterus turns against her. Poppy brings home a maladjusted rescue dog named Amy Klobuchar. The girls’ mother, a newly devout Messianic Jew, starts falling for the same deep-state conspiracy theories as Jules’s online mommies. Jules, halfheartedly struggling to scrape her way to the source of her ennui, slowly and cruelly comes to blame Poppy for her own insufficiencies as a friend, a writer, and a sister. And Amy Klobuchar might have rabies. As the year shambles on and a new decade looms near, a disastrous trip home to Florida forces Jules and Poppy—comrades, competitors, constant fixtures in each other’s lives—to ask themselves what they want their futures to look like, and whether they’ll spend them together or apart.

Deadpan, dark, and brutally funny, Worry is a sharp portrait of two sisters enduring a dread-filled American moment from a nervy new voice in contemporary fiction.

©2024 Alexandra Tanner (P)2024 Simon & Schuster Audio

I want my money back

There are ways to tell a story with out all the vulgarity and I’m no prude. Halfway through, I asked myself, “Why am I torturing myself through this terrible audio book!” And I stopped.

intriguing until the ending

the whole time i was listening, i was excited to recommend this book to my sister. after the ending, i unfortunately cannot in good conscience recommend this book to anyone. maybe if they skip the last chapter though?

Disturbing

I have never written a review before, and I admire anyone who has the courage to write. That said, this was one of the most disturbing, irritating, and at the same time pointlessly boring books I've ever seen through to the end. I kept hoping something would happen to explain or redeem the grating, repetitious complaining by two thoroughly flat and self-obsessed characters (not to mention the thoroughly revolting mother), but that did not happen - I unfortunately found instead an ending that would (and should) upset any feeling person; and if you have ANY affinity for animals, avoid this book at all costs. It should come with a trigger warning. I don't care about losing a credit over this, I only wish I could erase it from my brain. AWFUL.

I would call it, being from the West Coast, “Valley Girl” speak…very annoying

Not worth the time five six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve thirteen fourteen fifteen!

Vulgar

I listened for a couple of hours and it just got worse. Very trashy book.

Tried, failed.

Didn't enjoy this one. Kept going in hopes I'd start to enjoy it, finished it, wish I didn't.

Millennial Mayhem

Sorry I didn't ask for a refund after the first chapter. The book was described as witty and funny; maybe if you're in your twenties and suicidal you might find something interesting. I'm going back to Sense and Sensibility to read a book about sisters I can appreciate.

I Hated It

I hated every character in this book and regret the time I spent with them, except maybe the dog. There wasn't much plot. The way the sisters were supposed to be mirroring each other was heavy handed. The ending was unsatisfying. I will never know if the dog survived.

A True "Internet Novel"

There's a rich tradition of what some of us have called the "internet novel," when you think of books like Fake Accounts, No One Is Talking About This, The Novelist, et al, and Alexandra Tanner's Worry has loudly staked its claim as one of the best entries into this genre.

Helen Laser did a fabulous job bringing Jules & Poppy's sibling relationship & life journey into the imagination of listeners. I found myself, on multiple occasions, sending text out to friends telling them how funny this book was. This was also a book that, through Jules & Poppy's various forms of worry & angst, showed me in a deep way a thing that most books do, but sometimes less deepyl, which is that I am not alone in this weird life journey that I'm currently on. We are all doing our best to figure things out. We all have things we are worried about. More times than not, we will be fine & we will make it.

Alexandra Tanner has written a fabulous debut & she is an author who I hope to be reading more of over the years.