Worry

A Novel

By: Alexandra Tanner

Narrated by: Helen Laser

Length: 7 hrs and 13 mins

Publisher's summary

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

A “dryly witty” (The New Yorker) and “fabulously revealing” (The New York Times Book Review) debut that follows two sisters-turned-roommates navigating an absurd world on the verge of calamity—a Seinfeldian novel for listeners of Ottessa Moshfegh and Sally Rooney.

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.

“A tragicomic portrait of urban millennial life” (Shelf Awareness), Worry is a “riotously funny and wryly existential” (Harper’s Bazaar) novel of sisterhood from a nervy new voice in contemporary fiction.

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

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?

Excruciating to listen to

I found this novel to be exhausting and annoying, with no structure other than siblings bickering and moaning about their privileged lives. A tale of spoiled adults and a narcissistic mother. Wish my Book Group hadn’t picked this book. I wasted a lot of time listening to this which I could’ve spent on a really meaningful novel.

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.

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!

Too much yelling

Not sure if the book is any good because I couldn’t tolerate the constant yelling on the audio. Like listening to people argue all the time.

Constant confrontations between sisters

The constant disagreements between the sisters and their problems gave me anxiety and the story just ended

Tried, failed.

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

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.

Stupid ending

Too whiney and very depressing. Hated the characters and their relationship. And the mom was horrible