Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Akner was just too much. I had really wanted to like this but I couldn't find any redeeming qualities in the characters and just couldn't get through it. Just skip this one. Trigger warning all over the place. Thank you to the author,publisher and NetGalley for an ARC of this novel in exchange for my honest review.

Taffy’s description of family and how a traumatic event can ripple through generations is brilliant.

This felt like a roller coaster to me. Some segments of the story drew me in and I was enthralled. A few pages later, a new segment lost my interest and I struggled to keep reading. This was a powerful family drama, but I felt the story sometimes got lost in a sea of words.

Every book has its reader, and I am not well matched with this one. With in the first 50 to 100 pages, I knew.

Possible trigger warnings: Bondage, explicit sex, language, violence.

Brodesser-Akner has done it again! An utterly brilliant, compelling, funny, wise, devastating, fascinating novel, Long Island Compromise will undoubtedly be a critical and commercial smash. I loved and savored every page of it, feeling like a member of the Fletcher family myself. I laughed out loud, I cried, I felt all the feelings (discomfort, anger, joy, frustration, empathy, the list goes on) and loved the ending. I wish I could give this novel 10 stars!

I wanted to read this because I’d absolutely loved Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s first novel, Fleishman is in Trouble, but I didn’t like Long Island Compromise nearly as much.

Long Island Compromise starts out with the direct warning that this is a story with a terrible ending, and then explains how the the father of a wealthy family is kidnapped and held for ransom. But the book’s not a thriller or a mystery, it’s the story of how this kidnapping creates a trauma that ripples out through the family, and also how this trauma is the result of the previous generation’s traumas and the previous generation’s choices.

Usually, I really enjoy this kind of family saga, but this sort of missed the mark for me. Carl, the kidnapped father, has 3 children, who are all dysfunctional in different ways, exacerbated by the kidnapping, but because the dysfunctions are all so extreme, it’s hard to take the characters seriously enough to root for anyone.

There’s an intriguing thread about the oldest son, Nathan, and how his marriage mirrors his parents’ marriage, which mirrored his father’s parents’ marriage, and there’s another intriguing question about Nathan’s wife’s personal compromises of wealth and religion. But these are overshadowed by his brother Beamer’s OTT sex and pills addictions. At first, I enjoyed the meta layer of one sibling taking over the narrative, just as he’d taken all the space in the family. But the excessive fetishes and constant drug trips overshadowed the parts of the story that I was more invested in.

There’s more of this intriguing mirroring in the secondary stories, but it doesn’t quite become an ensemble story. I enjoyed the local history digressions, especially the feeling of generational curses from all sides, but these ultimately felt like digressions, not stories or background info for a main story. There’s an interesting theme about basement secrets (the old country, the kidnapping, the cracked foundation) but it didn’t quite resolve for me.

Despite the opening warning that this is going to be a sad ending and the characters with extreme self-destruction, there was somehow an overall atmosphere that the Fletchers were so cocooned in wealth that they’d be protected from any really negative consequences. I think because there was so much self-destructive behavior, I stopped worrying that mistakes would have consequences. I don’t think it’s 100% the money, I’ve enjoyed family sagas about wealthy families and their inheritance and trust issues before. The Heirs and The Nest are both fascinating family stories about what’s going to happen to the family wealth. Some part of the removal from consequences is really good — the author describes the grandchildren of privilege so well, and how they really didn’t experience any negative consequences. This makes an interesting and thoughtful contrast to the harsh survival in the old country, and the more working-class people who married in to the Fletchers, but that padding of wealth does bleed over into reducing the book’s tension. There’s a subplot about the family losing all their money, but something about it just didn’t ring true for me. As they discussed their missing deposits or losing the factory that first made the family rich, I wasn’t as much as worried for the characters as I was waiting for the dramatic eleventh-hour reversal of fortune that was so clearly coming. (I had the pacing of the reversal right, but not the actual events, I thought one of anxious Nathan’s 10,000 insurance policies were about to come in really handy here.)

The ending feels rushed and unfinished. There’s kind of a dream sequence which didn’t match the style of the rest of the novel for me, and then there’s not really a resolution of most of the other arcs. This was particularly frustrating to me, because I liked most of the secondary characters and minor arcs (Alyssa! Max! The weirdos on the city council!) a great deal.

There were a lot of scenes and subplots I liked in Long Island Compromise. There were a few moments I loved! So many telling details! But the unevenness left me with a feeling that this wasn’t that this was a just-fine novel, but that I was reading a rough draft of a truly brilliant book.

I rarely give a book this low of a rating but I felt like this book deserved it. I wanted to like this book but I just didn´t. It didn´t hold my attention past the kidnapping. I felt that the character development fell short and could have been so much more. Several times I wanted to quit reading but I kept hoping the book would get better. Sadly, it did not! This is the first bad review I have ever given for an ARC from NetGalley and I want to thank them for the opportunity to read this book.

I never thought I'd say this, but I'm stopping this at about 50%. I LOVED Fleishman Is In Trouble and resonated so much with the women in the book. We even lived in the same town! But this, to me, feels like it needs to be heavily edited (i.e. cut down). Each section is way too long and not just granular but feels like the author included everything in her mind and wanted to get every thought about every single thing out. I'm stopping at the part about the opening of Giant's... just so many pages on the legalities of this. It just lost me. Big bummer!

First off, this book was LONG. It was captivating from the first chapter (introduction), but then it lost me a bit. The timeline of the book was confusing, but reflecting back I really enjoyed it overall.

I am both Jewish & from Long Island, which I think contributed to me picking up this book in the first place and sticking with it. I have not read the authors other book so I went in blind beyond the title & cover.

All of the characters were extremely flawed and unlikely, and I didn't love how it ended, but overall I would recommend this book to others who can relate to the Long Island / Jewish upbringing it does a great job of depicting.

I am of two minds with this novel, which chronicles a fictional Jewish family on the north shore of Long Island and how they devolve after the father is kidnapped for a week. The three children are tracked as they grow up into dysfunctional adults with addiction problems, with marital problems, and with various other issues in trying to cope with their father's ordeal. The Long Island Compromise is really a devil's bargain -- having lived in one of the wealthiest suburbs in America, after escaping the Holocaust, after dealing with numerous anti-semitic people, places, and circumstances. Having grown up on Long Island's south shore and raised my daughter on the North Shore in a community that mirrors what is described in fictional terms in the novel, this story resonated with me. The excesses experiences with the family's wealth, and with trying to out-Jew their neighbors is all too real.

So is their reaction to the father's kidnapping, which manifests itself in different ways to each family member. Some choose avoidance : "any reference to a thing that could later be a trigger to discuss The Thing" -- the kidnapping -- is a very apt way to describe grief and the fragility of those who are grieving.

So what is there not to like about this book? It isn't that it cuts too close to home. It isn't that its scenes of BDSM or drug abuse or numerous hooker and mystic encounters are (as I imagine) too realistic. The descriptions are sometimes just so filled with irony and accuracy that I would often pause while reading to let them sink in. But they could be hard to take for some readers. And for those of you who grew up in suburbia, or who are Jewish, this could be entertaining, poignant, or both. Certainly, its treatment of how families confront their destinies and future potential is laid bare in a way that I haven't seen very often, and is quite genuine.

The novel is based on this actual kidnapping that happened in the 1970s:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kidnapping_of_Jack_Teich

In exactly what I've come to expect from Taffy Brodesser-Akner, this novel follows multiple people and generations in a Jewish family from Long Island. The story opens with a kidnapping of the father in the family, and then charts the fall out from the event that occurs decades later. It was perfect!

Thank you, NetGalley, for the ARC copy. I was very excited to read this book because I live on Long Island. It’s a book about traumatic experiences and how we deal with them. It’s not an easy book to read, and sometimes it can make you feel like it’s too much. Character development drives family members to make wrong decisions over and over again. If you're ready for family drama, wealthy settings, and sibling issues mixed with dark humor and a smart writing style, then get into it.
#LongIslandCompromise #NetGalley

Long Island Compromise tells the story of the Fletcher family, a wealthy Jewish family that lives in an exclusive Long Island town. Their lives are changed forever when Carl, the patriarch of the family, is kidnapped in 1980. He is returned to his family after a ransom is paid, but the trauma stays with him and his family for the rest of their lives. Now, 40 years later, we see just how this pivotal event affects each member of the family. Taffy Brodesser-Akner creates incredibly multi-dimensional characters with so many flaws, fears, anxieties - she doesn't shy away from the good, the bad, and the ugly. The story is at turns hilarious and incredibly stressful, thanks to the author's ability to create tension and then keep layering it on, resulting in a compelling page-turner that evokes every possible emotion. I really enjoyed this, even more than Fleishman is in Trouble, and I look forward to seeing what this author does next!

Taffy Brodesser-Akner is an incredibly talented writer, but after enjoying Fleishman Is In Trouble and struggling with her latest, Long Island Compromise, I think that I may simply not be a good reader for her. The characters in this novel are SO unpleasant and the novel is unflinching in its refusal to give them growth or catharsis. While I understand that this may have been the project of the novel, I think it also undermined some potentially very interesting themes, such as exploring how the Fletchers handled and processed (or refused to process) the kidnapping that kicks off the novel.

I think that for readers who loved Fleishman Is In Trouble, there will be a lot to enjoy. For me, however, while I could certainly appreciate Brodesser-Akner's skill as an observer and storyteller, it was white-knuckling the book until the bitter end.

Thank you to Random House and NetGalley for an advance review copy of Long Island Compromise. All opinions are my own.

This book blew me away, right away. I loved to love the rich (!) portrayal of the wealthy family and the religious and generational traditions and history; and I loved to hate the broken, needy, abusive people and generational drama. Zelig, the patriarch, escaped from WWII Poland to establish himself in America through hard work, wily intuition and perseverance. He marries Phyllis, they have children, whose children have children, every generation getting richer, weaker, more troubled. “The first generation builds the house, the second generation lives in the house, the third generation burns the house down.”
The ability of the author to crawl into these characters skins to reveal their hopes, dreams, mistakes, tics, and flaws is stunning. It feels so REAL. Unvarnished, interesting, uncomfortable, compelling, cringy, fairy tale lives. Nathan is both paralyzed and completely ruled by his intense anxiety; Beamer is trying to punish himself and feel something, anything, through sex and drugs; Jenny is punishing everyone around her through her aloofness and superior intelligence, while debilitating depression causes her to shrivel from the inside out.
These people create the worst milieu for everyone while they struggle, oblivious, with what they consider their own problems. This story is a cautionary tale about entitlement, privilege, wealth, and perhaps not learning your lesson….
I would like to register a complaint with the author for causing me to lose much productivity in my life while I couldn’t stop reading, couldn’t take my eyes off the words, couldn’t get ENOUGH of these characters, their foibles, their glories, the story (with some nice little twists).

Long Island Compromise begins with the kidnapping of Carl Fletcher from the driveway of his palatial Long Island home as he’s getting ready to head to work at his polystyrene factory. He is held hostage for a week, unfindable by the FBI, until his wife Ruth comes up with $250,000 ransom payment, dropped on a luggage turnstile at JFK. Although Carl returns to his previous life and his wife and mother attempt desperately to make things seem and feel normal, the family is never able to get over the trauma of that week, which is passed down to his three children.

The kidnapping, which took place in 1980, is only the first chapter of the book; the rest takes place in the present and is told through the lens of Carl’s three struggling adult children. While they have been blessed with an extraordinary amount of money from their father’s factory to pad their lifestyles, each of them is utterly dysfunctional in nearly everything they attempt. When they discover that the factory has been purchased by a hedge fund that sees no financial future in domestic styrofoam production, they are each forced to face the reality of a dwindling fortune while also salvaging their crumbling personal lives.

The description of this book reads like an utter downer, and that’s not totally untrue. Each character is living in a comedy of errors, hitting rock bottom right as you think there is no farther for them to fall. However, in the hands of Taffy Brodesser-Akner, author of Fleishman is in Trouble and a staff writer at The New York Times Magazine, the tragedy becomes absurdity which translates into comedy. The story is meant to be a type of satire on the evolution of American Jewish life and assimilation. It is also a quasi-moralistic fable about wealth and struggle, which wasn’t always subtle. My biggest problem with the book was that the central trauma inspires everyone’s problems - the kidnapping - is never fully explained or resolved. Brodesser-Akner reveals who the true kidnapper was at the end, and it is shocking, but the motivations and minutiae are either completely ignored or explained away in a few sentences. Given that the book is comprised of approximately four large chapters, each told from the perspective of a different member of the family, it would have been fully justified to dedicate an additional chapter to the kidnapper, which I think would have adequately addressed the larger ethical themes that Brodesser-Akner is attempting to explore. Overall, however, Long Island Compromise was an enjoyable reading experience and I look forward to seeing people’s reactions when it is released on July 9.

Brodesser-Akner is a terrific writer, and this book drew me in just as quickly as any of her other writing, but it was just too cringy for me to stick with. And Beamer was such an unpleasant character, I just couldn't spend more time with him. But for people who enjoy Curb Your Enthusiasm and its ilk, I'm sure it will land better.

For whatever reason, I thought this book may be more of the same vein as "Fleishman is in Trouble" but it didn't have that same feel, The novel starts out with the father of a wealthy family being kidnapped for ransom, and then he is returned with his ears and body parts, which his kidnappers boasted had been removed, and then without much fanfare, the novel moves on with the children becoming adults, and Nathan is obsessed with addiction to masochistic sex, yet, the three children do think about their father's traumatic event now and then, though we don't see much of Carl, the father. After awhile, all the characters felt rather slapstick, unreal, and as much as I kept returning to the novel, hoping the pace would be less repetitive, the characters more interesting (could just be me that I tend to find books evolved around wealthy characters a bit bland), but I wasn't feeling too involved with this novel.

I enjoyed this family saga a lot. A memorable narrative voice that doesn't rely on tricks but grows out of the stellar writing. I love the structural choices the author made, exploring each of the siblings' lives until they reach their breaking point, then switching to another family member. It all comes together in the end, of course, in a way that made it all feel inevitable.

This book follows the lives of the members of a Jewish American family after the dramatic kidnapping of the father and examines the impact of that trauma on his wife and his three children. They all grow up with some major life issues, but is the trauma to blame? They also grow up with the comfort of the family's money, but is it a help or a hindrance? The writing is smart and often entertaining, but I feel a bit conflicted about the book because the characters all seem to be awful. I both wanted to find out what would happen to them and also didn't want to read more because they just seemed to be getting worse. Did no one think of getting therapy? As much as the characters make messes of their lives, I think this book poses some really interesting questions about how we deal with trauma, both personal and cultural, and about whether trying to ease our children's path in life helps or harms them. I gave it 3.5 stars, rounded up to 4.

Thank you to Random House and NetGalley for providing me with an ARC in return for an honest review. This book will be published July 9, 2024.