I really liked this book. It spanned life in New York City from the Great Depression through WWII, and covers a lot of ground from gambling and payoffs, clubs and the mob, Navy diving, to prejudice and feminism during the war. There were some weak spots, and I thought the ending was rushed, but all in all it was a great read.

Anna Kerrigan is a small girl who worships her father Eddie, who is basically a bagman. He takes her with him everywhere until she gets tot old, and on one of these visits she meets Dexter Styles, a rich nightclub owner who will have an impact on her life she cannot imagine at the time. Anna's sister Lydia was born disabled, and she and her mother have to take care of her every need. Anna loves but also resents her sister at times.

The story jumps to Anna as an adult working in the Navy yard. She decides she want to be a Navy diver, and her journey to get there is the most interesting part of the book. The subplot is Dexter Styles making an appearance in Anna's life, and it's interesting, especially the descriptions of New York social life in the 1940s.

Although it took some time to get into, I highly recommend this book. Thanks to Scribner and NetGalley for the ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

An interesting story but a very slow read. The characters are well developed, but the storyline just plods along. The book should have been 100 pages shorter..

That was disappointing. I adored A Visit from the Goon Squad; it was one of my favourite books of last year, so you can imagine how beyond excited I was to read this book - I took my sweet time starting it to be able to read it at the just the right moment, I was so sure I would love this. But I didn't. I enjoyed the first chapter and was ok with the ones following - until around page 150 - when I realized that I have no idea what the point is, what the book is about, what I am supposed to feel. The book is both too narrow and too broad and as a result left me feeling slightly bemused and more than a little disappointed.

The book tells three wildly differing stories: Anna's story and her struggle to find her own place in a world made for men; her father's story and his problems with the mob; and Dexter Styles' story, a nightclub owner with ties to the mob and to high society. These stories are intertwined and related but seem to be set in completely different genres. While I enjoyed Anna and her interactions with her sister and the men she works with when she becomes the first women diver at New York's harbour, I thought the whole gangster story line was both superfluous and infuriating. If it had been cut, the book would have been 250 pages shorter and much better for it.

The jumps in time (which is something I often enjoy) underscored the rambling feeling of this book; they made it near impossible for me to care about what was happening because important events were glossed over or told in an aside. People would disappear, just to reappear in time for them to be needed for plot related reasons; some things made no sense for the characters involved; some plot twists came out of the left field and were left unexplained.

It seems like a book with very many different ideas and many different themes to explore that never manages to become a cohesive whole.

First sentence: "They had driven all the way to Mr. Style's house before Anna realized that her father was nervous."

Wow! What an incredible story. Manhattan Beach follows Anna, a woman working at the Brooklyn Navy Yard during World War II who dreams of becoming the first female diver. I found myself captivated by Anna's world and fascinated by the history surrounding it. Egan is a masterful storyteller, and I love that she engaged in so much research to create this book in a way that feels authentic. Fully deserving of its place on the 2017 National Book Award Fiction Long List!

2.5 stars, rounded up
“Hope became the memory of hope: a numb, dead patch.” This books starts in the midst of the Depression and continues during WWII. Anna is initially a twelve year old and a true daddy’s girl. Then she's working at the Naval Yard during the war and her father has disappeared five years earlier.

The writing here is as good as you'd expect from Jennifer Egan. And she's done her research and the parts of the book describing the Naval Yard and the merchant ships ring true. But for some reason, I had trouble connecting. There was just something missing. I couldn't for the life of me figure out why Anna felt a connection with Styles or he with her. The whole book had an incongruous nature to it. Cohesion was missing. I kept waiting for something to tie it all together.

The book moved at a snail’s pace. Long periods of time where nothing much happened. And even the places with activity, the activity just wasn’t all that gripping. You know how when you're reading a good book, you'll do anything to get back to it? Here, I kept finding excuses not to read, which is very odd for me. I kept avoiding the book.

My thanks to netgalley and Scribner for an advance copy of this book.

Jennifer Egan’s new book Manhattan Beach is a puzzle. I enjoyed reading it, and then felt less than positive about it…but now, a few weeks later, I realize I keep thinking about certain aspects of it, so I think that adds at least one star! The story begins in Brooklyn during the Depression, when we meet Anna Kerrigan. She is almost twelve years old and loves accompanying her father as he “does business.” It’s clear both her father and her mother are extremely influential in her view of the world: “Never part with a fact unless you’ve no choice. Her father’s voice in her ears.” And “Working with your hands meant taking orders—in her mother’s case, from Pearl Gratzky…” While accompanying her father on a particular visit, she views an interaction that leads her to understand there is some secret pact between her father and a man named Dexter Styles. Not long after, her father disappears, leaving Anna alone with her mother and sister.

Two major events as Anna is growing up: her father disappears and the country goes to war. She needs to work as she is the sole support of her mother and her beautiful sister (who is totally disabled). She begins working at the Navy Yard in Brooklyn where, suddenly, women are being allowed to do work that had always been men’s jobs. Egan does a great job using that environment to convey a great deal about her characters using descriptive language: ” Dunellen gave a drooping, corroded impression, like a freighter bone to rust after being too long at anchor.” Egan also shows the reader Anna’s unique personality and quirkiness: “She’d never been good at banter; it was like a skipping rope whose rhythm she couldn’t master enough to jump in with confidence.” But she DOES have the confidence to jump into being the first female diver, an incredibly dangerous job, repairing the ships that are critical to the War effort.

One night, she is at a nightclub and meets Dexter Styles, the man she visited with her father before he vanished. Anna’s life away from work leads her to begin to understand the reality of her father’s life and the reasons he might have been murdered (which is surely what happened, otherwise why would he have just gone away and she would never have heard from him?).

The story is historical fiction and also sort of a “noir thriller.” There is a ton of information about organized crime, the merchant marine and the clash of classes in New York, Thinking about it after the fact, I realize it was the ending/resolution that made me think I didn’t care for it. (Also perhaps my extremely high expectations based on all the hype). But the story of a young woman fighting to make it in a man’s world at a time of social turmoil is fascinating, and Egan does have an outstanding gift for character development. I’m grateful to Scribner and NetGalley for providing an advance copy of Manhattan Beach in exchange for my honest review. I first thought four stars, then it slipped to two and a half, but after a couple of weeks’ reflection, it is back to a solid four stars.

Genre: Historical Fiction (Adult)
Pub. Date: Oct. 3, 2017
Publisher: Scribner

Here is the thing about this author, Jennifer Egan: she is brilliant, I might go as far as to say there is a something Shakespearean in her writing, complete with betrayal and tragedy. But like Shakespeare, for me, she can be hard to follow. I did read her 2010 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “A Visit from the Goon Squad.” “Goon Squad” has a complicated narrative with each chapter written as a tweet, or a music chart, or a PowerPoint presentation. In other words, her writing style is unique in this work.

In “Manhattan Beach” the author writes a traditional novel. The story spans from the years of the Great Depression to WWII. We meet the Kerrigans, a Brooklyn family, and learn of their successes and failures. There is twelve-year-old Anna, her adored father, Eddie, her mother and severely disabled little sister. They are a Brooklyn Irish family that is barely scraping by in the 1930s with a strong father-daughter bond. Sounds familiar right? But this is not “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.” There is another protagonist, the New York gangster, Dexter Styles. The father works for him. The book’s title comes from the gangster’s wealthy home on Manhattan Beach.

This is a hard review for me to write because the book is clearly well researched, which is always a plus. The feel of the novel is realistic, as are the characters. Furthermore, I love historical fiction and as a native New Yorker, I was drawn into the story with its sharp observations of NYC in this time frame. Maybe it is the plot that bothered me? There didn’t seem to be a steady tempo. I felt as though I was reading three different stories about the girl, the father and the gangster. It is when Egan flashes forward several years that I began to have trouble with the storyline.

Anna at 19 is working at the Brooklyn Naval Yard. Her father has mysteriously disappeared. She alone is the breadwinner. She elbows her way into a job as their first female diver. She also sleeps with Dexter (who initially doesn’t realize whose daughter she is). Of course, there is a disastrous outcome. The affair’s beginning seems so unlikely that it reads absurd. No matter how talented the author is, this just feels like way too much soap for my taste. I cannot talk about the father’s fate for it would be a spoiler, but that also is a bit hokey.

So what do you say about a book written by an extremely talented author, in your favorite genre, with interesting characters that keeps you hooked until it doesn’t? I am not sure. (I wish I could quote to explain, but the publisher doesn’t allow this since the book is not yet published). Maybe, I need to brush up on my own skills. Or, maybe, it would have read better as interconnected short stories. Either way, I can safely recommend that you read this book if you wish to get lost in the world of the past, the Navy, a young woman breaking into a man's field, speakeasies, nightclubs and the end of Prohibition. As well as a lovely family saga, expect your heart to break for them. Just don't be surprised when things start getting far-fetched.

I am a Jennifer Egan fan and was delighted to received a copy prior to publication. I LOVED Look at Me and greatly admired her award-winning novel, A Visit From the Goon Squad.

This, not so much. That being said, I was caught up in the story of Anna Kerrigan, particularly her struggles to become a [female!] Navy diver in the 1940s. The other stories surrounding Anna I felt were uneven--and even some of her story. Billed as historical fiction? Not really though again, Anna's uphill battle to become a Navy diver was the most compelling part of the book.

Starting in Brooklyn in the Great Depression, Anna, then "...nearly twelve years old, accompanies her father to the house of a man who, she gleans, is crucial to the survival of her father and her family. Anna observes the uniformed servants, the lavishing of toys on the children, and some secret pact between her father and Dexter Styles.

Years later, her father has disappeared and the country is at war. Anna works at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where women are allowed to hold jobs that had always belonged to men. She [eventually] becomes the first female diver...repairing the ships that will help America win the war. "

There is much more. Dexter Styles, the "gangster" tied to her father--the latter disappears early in the book. Anna's relationship with Styles--semi-spoiler alert--really?! Dexter's family/relationships and how it drives some of the story.

Anna's home life. Her mother, a former showgirl, now seamstress. Her severely disabled sister Lydia, around whom much of the initial story revolves. Her aunt, Brianne, a single women who lives by her wits--what else? Nell, her one friend. Mr. Voss, her former boss. Marle, the Negro welder. These are all interesting characters but without much to do for the most part.

Well written, but it also dragged and I felt was too long. And Eddie's story [Anna's father]--by the time it had a real substantial part in the book, I no longer cared.

So, be forewarned. You may really like it. Or find it very uneven and a bumpy ride.

Manhattan Beach is a book full of vivid characters and the looming effects of WWII and the recovery from Prohibition that change norms and opportunities.

The novel hops around in time, with the continual gravitational center of the relationship between a union bagman and his daughter; and the gangster/nightclub owner who comes into both of their lives and alters them irrevocably.

We visit them at different points in time after the father has to disappears, which is shortly after Anna's adolescence and sexual experimentation and her father's more dangerous errand excluding her has distanced them from their formerly very close relationship. Circumstances then cause her to investigate his disappearance and reconnect with Dexter, who must navigate being both an Irishman in an Italian mob and being equally out of place with his wife's socialite family. Layer upon layer is revealed to find the adventures that the father undertook, while Anna has her own adventures living alone in the city and going from inspecting parts for battleships to becoming one of the first females allowed to dive underwater to repair and salvage ships at the naval yard.

Through it all, the beach and the pull of water serves as a unifying theme, and each character has thrills and perils at the hands of the beautiful and merciless ocean.

This was interesting. The story is a weird mixture of New York gangsters, merchant marines, and a "plucky" girl making her way in the big city. It was almost as if there were three separate stories and Egan was trying too hard to make them all fit together.

I can tell she did a lot of research in preparation for this novel, but for some reason it just did not translate well into the finished novel. The writing was well done, the story just didn't capture my attention as well as it should.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publishers for allowing me an ARC for review.

Jennifer Egan is a truly brilliant writer. Each of her books involve complex characters portrayed beautifully and convincingly. And what is more remarkable is that none of her books bear the slightest resemblance to one another! in MANHATTAN BEACH, Egan gives us gives us a wonderful story told by three characters, each of whom is struggling with their own ambitions. After her father abandons them, Anna Kerrigan become the sole supporter of her mother and disabled sister. Although Anna appears to be the quintessential "good girl," she is really a curious and determined adventurer. Her father, Eddie Kerrigan, is a watcher and listener, dabbling with mobsters to get ahead in life, which ultimately does not serve him well. Dexter Styles is a gangster with an outwardly conventional life and family and he longs to move in to legitimacy but is held back by his past. Throughout the books the lives of Anna, Eddie and Dexter overlap, sometimes in curious ways. Egan gives us such a sense of place - one can almost hear and smell the Naval shipyard wear Anna works and see the ocean and smell the salt air from Dexter's porch. And I especially loved learning about divers during the second world war. As a scuba diver myself, I found the whole process fascinating and Egan described it so well that I could feel the heavy weight of the diving helmet pushing down on my shoulders. This was the best book I have read this year and I look forward to sharing it with others.

Beautifully written, this is an unusual story full of meticulous historical detail. The main character, Anna, grows up in New York during the Great Depresion, and the main plot line is her search as an adult woman for her father, Eddie, a man mixed up in the murky gangster world, and who mysteriously disappears when she is a child. Yet it is more the story of Anna’s battle for equality as she becomes a deep sea diver in the early days when the diving equipment was mindblowingly clumsy, heavy, and scary. These diving scenes were the most interesting and vivid for me. In the second half the story becomes rather disjointed as it switches between Anna’s and Eddie’s stories, and the end is somewhat an anticlimax. Overall, an impressive novel, but perhaps too long, too much telling of history, and with characters who, apart from Anna and her disabled sister, not especially likeable or compelling!

This multilayered story is on the surface a story about New York City and gangsters and what happens when you lose favor with them. But dig deeper and it is a story of survival and escaping the hand that life has dealt you (being controlled by the gangsters that ruled your neighborhood, etc.). It is a story of not being afraid to make tough choices and accepting the potential consequences. The story starts slow and at times didn't hold my attention.

Started but not for me, no review for incomplete book, it isn't fair. Loved Goon Squad but couldn't connect with this one. Sorry!
Had to add a star rating to send this.

messages and money between gangster club owners. One day he walks out the door never to return, leaving Anna, her mother, and disabled sister behind.
Year pass, the world is at war, and Anna moves to New York. It was so interesting to read about the many women working as welders and labourers, jobs that were previously only considered for men. Working in an office in the New York shipyard, Anna desperately wants to train as a diver and encounters a lot of resistance from the bosses who think it is ludicrous for a woman to attempt such a difficult and dangerous job. A contact that Anna makes at this job gives her a lead to follow on what happened to her father.
Meanwhile, the narrative shifts to Anna’s father and the reader follows his story as well.
The main characters, Anna, her father, and the gangster are all so well developed, each one flawed and complex.
I highly recommend this novel!
Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

After Anna Kerrigan's gangster father disappears, she comes of age during WWII and begins a career as a diver working on warships but her father's legacy lingers on in her life.

Jennifer Egan's Visit From the Goon Squad was a masterpiece in entangled stories. Manhattan Beach weaves a few narratives together in a much less haphazard but also less enticing story: Anna Kerrigan's father is a gangster in New York, her mother is an ex-Follies dancer, and her sister suffered a birth injury and is permanently disabled.  After Anna's father disappears, Anna is working a tedious job doing parts inspections for the war when she notices the divers going under water in the harbor and is suddenly drawn to them. After becoming a diver herself, she becomes entangled with Dexter Styles, a nightclub owner who was a contact of her father's. Styles lives in Manhattan Beach on Coney Island, and Anna visits his home as a child with her father and then visits again with her sister as an adult.

It is clear from this book that Jennifer Egan did her research on women in the war, gangsters in New York of the era, and the war in general. But in her attempt to pull it all together to build a narrative, it gets bogged down in the story lines of Anna, her father, and Dexter Styles.  There is little suspense and the characters lack dimension. During the time when Anna's whole family is together in their apartment, the story holds together and the characters come alive. The forays into gangster conversations and even Anna's career seem plastic and the characters' motivations are just not clear. It reminded me a bit of Elizabeth Gilbert's The Signature of All Things-- like the author's desire to paint a picture of a woman's life at a certain point in history just made the story overly earnest and stilted. In some ways it seems like too modern of a perspective, in that there is little mention of the shaming that would have been directed at a woman with her status. Although Anna experiences adversity, it's hard to really grasp the amount of strength she would have to have to pursue her diving career. Class is an issue, but it's just not felt in the way that makes it real. Anna is too impervious. The thing I loved about Egan's previous book, A Visit from the Goon Squad, was how it captured the different phases of people's lives, the miasma of disappointment and indecision and inertia that engulfs people as they get older. Manhattan Beach shows glimpses of that, for example when Dexter Styles tries and fails to redirect his career, and when Anna's father does the same. But the story seems so stretched to force Anna into her diving career and into the storyline with Dexter Styles, it loses sight of her humanity.

Egan's descriptions of war ships residing in the bays of New York City are moving. The machinery of war dominating the shorelines of New York is an overwhelming image. Her portrayal of the tedium of the work done by women and the men who were not fighting is fascinating. Anna's dive-mates are all men who are not fighting in the war, and I wish their stories had eclipsed some of the gangster stories. Marle, the only black person on the dive crew, is marginalized in the same way that Anna is. Their wary interactions and eventual friendship were interesting.

The book was recently longlisted for the National Book Award, and Jennifer Egan won a Pulitzer Prize for A Visit from the Goon Squad.

I was looking forward to reading this but sadly didn't like it. It was extensively researched, the historical atmosphere and tone were all in place, but I found the characters and a lot of the plot to be just... meh and uninvolving. In some ways it felt like the author was trying to write a romance novel, but left out all the heart and soul that make romance novels work and make us care about the character's lives and fates. All the emphasis was on Eddie and Dexter stories, and I didn't like or care about them. So, unfortunately, not a recommended read.

Thanks to NetGalley and to Scribner for providing me with an ARC copy of this book (due for publication in October) that I freely chose to review.
I read Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad a few years back and I was fascinated by its language, the stories, the way the story was told, and its inventiveness. When I saw Egan’s new book on offer at NetGalley I couldn’t resist. I have not read any of Egan’s other novels, but this one is very different from A Visit. For starters, this is a historical fiction novel. Both from the content of the novel and from the author’s acknowledgements at the end, we get a clear sense of how much research has gone into it. The novel covers a period around World War II, in New York and the surrounding area, and focuses on three stories that are interconnected, and are also connected to seafaring, the seafront, New York, and to the war era. The story goes backwards and forwards at times, sometimes through the memories of the characters, and sometimes within the same chapter, we get to see how that particular character got to that point. Although the story is narrated in the third person, we are firmly inside the character’s heads, and we can be at sea one minute, and the next at home remembering one gesture, a smile…
Anna Kerrigan is the strongest character and the one we spend more time with. We follow her story and know of her circumstances: a severely disabled sister, a father who disappears, and a mother who decides to go back to her family. Anna is a young woman, independent and determined to live her own life. She has never made peace with her father’s disappearance and remembers a strange encounter, when she accompanied her father as a child, with a man later revealed to be a gangster. Anna’s story was the one I was most interested in. Partly, because she was the character we got to know in more detail, partly because of her eagerness and determination, as she decides to become a diver and does not give up until she achieves her goal (at a time when being a woman severely limited one’s options, even during the war, when there were a few more openings, as she was already working at the Navy Yard). Her relationship with her sister, her training to become a diver (and you feel as if you were with her inside the incredibly heavy suit), and her obsession with finding out what happened to her father make her somebody to root for, although I found it difficult to engage at an emotional level with the character (it was as if she was contemplating herself at a distance and always analysing what she was doing, except for some brief moments when we get a sense of what she is feeling).
Dexter Styles is a strange character: he married a woman of the upper-class, and he has a good relationship with her father and her family, but by that point he was already involved in some shady deals and the underbelly of New York clubs and gambling joints, and he is smart, elegant, classy, but also ruthless and a gangster. I’ve read in a number of reviews that there are better books about New York gangsters of the period, and although I don’t recall having read any, I suspect that is true. I found the background of the character interesting, and his thoughts about the links between banking, politics, legal business, and illegal enterprises illuminating, but I am not sure I would say I completely got to know the character and did not feel particularly attached to it. (His relationship with Anna is a strange one. Perhaps it feels as if it was fate at work, but although I could understand to a certain extent Anna’s curiosity and attraction, Styles did not appear to be a man who’d risk everything for a fling. And yet…).
Eddie, Anna’s father, makes a surprise appearance later in the book and we get to learn something that by that point we have suspected for a while. From the reviews I’ve read, I’m probably one of the only people who enjoyed Eddie’s story, well, some parts of it. I love Melville (and the book opens with one of his quotes) and when Eddie is at sea, in the Merchant Navy, and his ship sinks, there were moments that I found truly engaging and touching. He is not a sympathetic character overall, as he takes a terribly selfish decision at one point in the book, but seems to redeem himself (or is at least trying) by the end.
This is a long book, but despite that, I felt the end was a bit rushed. We discover things that had been hidden for most of the book, several characters make life-changing decisions in quick succession, and I was not totally convinced that the decisions fitted the psychological makeup of the characters or the rest of the story, although it is a satisfying ending in many ways.
The novel’s rhythm is slow, although as I mentioned above, it seems to speed up at the end. There are jumps forward and backwards in time, that I did not find particularly difficult to follow, but it does require a degree of alertness. There are fascinating secondary characters (Nell, the bosun…), and the writing is beautifully descriptive and can make us share in the experiences of the characters at times, but I also felt it didn’t invite a full emotional engagement with them. I was not a hundred per cent sure that the separate stories interconnected seamlessly enough or fitted in together, and I suspect different readers will like some of the characters more than others, although none are totally blameless or sympathetic. An interesting book for those who love historical fiction of that period, especially those who enjoy women’s history, and I’d also recommend it to those who love seafaring adventures and/or are curious about Egan’s career.

The story begins in the depression with 12 year old Anna and her father, who later abandons the family. During WWII, Anna becomes the first woman diver at the Brooklyn Navy Yard and learns the secrets of her father who she suspects was involved with the mob. A good historical fiction about this time in US history, the role of women, merchant marine life, organized crime and class distinctions.

Anna Kerrigan is a strong willed young woman trying to carve out a meaningful life in Brooklyn during WWII. Anna has a sister who has muscular dystrophy, and she spends her evenings and weekends, helping her mother care for Lydia. Anna's father is a bagman for mobster Dexter Styles. As a child, Anna always accompanied her father on his business visits, and they were very close.

The war gears up, and Anna's dad has disappeared. Anna works in the shipyards of Brooklyn setting her sights on getting a job as a diver. It isn't an easy for women to get accepted in those kinds of positions, so Anna turns to her supervisor in the welding department, Mr. Voss, for help. With iron clad determination and an unwavering vision, Anna becomes the first female sea diver.

The rest of Anna's story is about her love of life and nature. Jennifer Egan presents the story of WWII, Irish Americans, and young women of the day with a finely tuned ear for young love and the grief of loss, and the ravages of war. I enjoyed this novel and learned so much about a part of history and life in Brooklyn at Manhattan Beach.

Thank you to Net Galley, Jennifer Egan, and Scribner for the opportunity to read and review this e-ARC (pub. date 10/3).