I read this book during the height of the Pandemic and was amazed at how articulate and poignant it was. I'm not sure I've ever read anything that so accurately describes the struggles faced by older millenials (those of us now in our late 30's and early 40's). It was brutal, honest and just so real. I identified with the main character and felt as if Steiger Strong was actually inside my own head at times! So insightful, very well done.

This was book was so depressing for me. I put it down for 3 days and considered not finishing. However I was drawn to the main character and how relatable her stream of consciousness was. I had to see her through. Then it just ended without an ending which I guess is fitting. I both enjoyed and hated this book. What can I say? COVID times.

There are so many layers to this story. It's a case study of a woman who is balancing her work life with motherhood. But on top of that, she has a complicated relationship with her (former?) best friend...and she and her husband are running out of money, despite their best efforts. This is more of a character-focused story than a plot-centric one, but it was a compelling look into an ordinary life.

This book was just an okay read. Although there were a few twists in it the story overall was quite predictable and did not keep me interested.

Have you ever worked as an adjunct? These part-time teaching jobs can be satisfying. But sometimes you find yourself teaching subjects that are not one-size-fit-all, like remedial English composition, quite often for a challenging population, a mix of refugees from war zones and middle-aged moms, many with a dicey knowledge of reading and writing – and some literally do not speak English. So if you have a master’s or Ph.D. in English, comparative literature, anthropology, linguistics or theater, prepare to improvise.

After reading a review in "The Nation" of two novels about adjuncts, I picked up a copy of Lynn Steger Strong’s stunning novel, "Want." It deals with two kinds of want: poverty and the want of love. What happens to people who opt out of the system to work at untraditional jobs? This novel is about the economy.

The narrator, Elizabeth, is a quiet, likable 34-year-old teacher in New York, with a Ph.D. in English, two children. and a lovable husband who left his career to become a carpenter. Her rich parents give them no money – and she doesn’t want to take it, because they are such assholes. (They threaten occasionally to take away her children.)

Elizabeth holds the family together: she teaches one English class for graduate students as a university adjunct, and is also a full-time teacher at a charter school where the impoverished Black students are underserved. I’ve got to hand it to Elizabeth: she hates the high school job, but manages to make an impression on her students. The principal, however, finds Shakespeare irrelevant. Instead of inspiring students to discuss Hamlet, she is supposed to do “test prep.” And so she is transferred to teach seniors, who have already taken all their tests, because the principal says she isn’t trained in test prep. And so she loses the class she has spent almost a year with. She starts skipping out early.

Fortunately, her home life is congenial. She and her husband are very affectionate and have two happy, well-adjusted children. But Elizabeth is so tense she gets up at five in the morning and goes running for fifteen miles (or at least that is the number that stuck in my mind).

And their money is running out. What can they do? They file bankruptcy, but that is still not enough. Her husband is buried under student debt. Should they leave Brooklyn? Their building in Brooklyn is going condo and they can’t afford to buy. Privately, I kept thinking: they could live in relative splendor on much less elsewhere! But they feel that their only other option would be to live on a farm in Maine owned by her husband’s parents, where they would be snowbound three or four months a year.

This novel is mostly about the economy, but parts are also devoted to her quasi-sexual love for her best friend, Sasha, who lived near her when she grew up in Florida. These women were so close that one summer they lived together and went out every night to read their books at a bar, where beautiful Sasha meets various men and goes home with them. Elizabeth is jealous – she is so close to Sasha that she wants her to mock the men and go back to the apartment with her. But Sasha falls apart, has a mental breakdown after she falls in love with a man who doesn’t want her, and never seems to recover after a baby she wants dies in her womb. Elizabeth realizes that Sasha’s beauty doesn’t save her -that Sasha wants everyone to love her. And Elizabeth is too exhausted to continue the friendship. But she wistfully stalks her on Instagram, which Sasha never updates.

This is an intelligent literary page-turner, which I read in a couple of sittings. I won’t tell you the decisions Elizabeth makes, except to say they are unexpected. And one wonders, not for the first time, why doing a job well and drawing on your deep knowledge can make you so poor.

This book is an intimate glimpse inside the mind and heart of a woman who seems to "have it all." I could relate to so much of this book; but, ultimately, found the reading/writing style a little difficult to keep up with and the friendship between the two main characters a bit unrelatable.

Want explores the universally held desire of all humans from the perspective of a privileged, middle-aged white woman. I appreciated the depiction of our broken education system.

It may be that reading this book during a pandemic worked against it. It reminded me of Zorba the Greek's summary of his life, "the full catastrophe". The characters have a life that from the outside might be enviable to many but those observers would have no idea of what lies beneath and what it all feels like. This book felt oppressive to me....but then I read it while living in a quarantine that felt endless.

It likely would have been a different experience to read "Want" in a year other than this one given the heaviness of its themes, but whew, this book left me feeling claustrophobic and a bit on edge - and I think that was the point.

Based on the description, I expected Elizabeth's relationship with her former friend Sasha to factor much more heavily into the narrative than it did. It's billed as a story of how that reunion changes her course, but reuniting with Sasha was just one of many swirling confrontations Elizabeth encounters as she tries to navigate the pressures closing in on her from family, from her job, from her relationships, from her city, from herself.

This is definitely a stream of consciousness story, and one with a main character for whom it's hard to feel sustained sympathy based on some of the choices she makes. But it's about the messiness of the often unfair, unrealistic pressures women can face in every aspect of their lives, sometimes all at once - and what it feels like when those pressures run up against personal desire, even when you're not sure what that desire is, or what it means.

Everything about this book is up my alley. I love an introspective, ranty character study. It felt almost too heavy for the time I read it, which I can't hold against it, but I have a feeling it'll weigh heavy on the reader no matter when they read it. Not a spoiler, but I'm pretty sure that's the point.

A slip of a novel about motherhood, career, finances, and friendship and who we are beyond the roles that attempt to define our lives. The writing took my breath away and I'll be thinking of this one for a long time.

Motherhood today is not easy and WANT is an excellent, all too realistic portrayal of a woman struggling with being a mother and working, as well as facing financial instability. This was an uncomfortably real look at the situation for so many women today. This novel demonstrated how, while someone may be perceived as middle class, the hard truth is often a paycheck to paycheck existence, while trying to follow their dreams and keep up with unrealistic societal expectations.

Excellent portrayal of a woman struggling with being a mother and working, as well as financial instability. It felt so relatable to the lives of many women. Demonstrating how many people who are perceived as middle class, live only paycheck to paycheck while trying to accomplish their dreams and keep up. The struggle of the modern, highly educated woman is not always the most comfortable life.

This short novel packed a punch. It left me feeling a little bit short of breath. This novel follows Elizabeth who is a mother, a wife, a teacher, a runner, living in New York City. She is also drowning, overwhelmed by the minor and major traumas of her life.

I don’t really know how to rate this one. It was incredibly depressing and there weren’t many moments of surfacing from the main character’s depression and anxiety so it felt incredibly heavy. I thought the way we are stuck with her was really effective—we never get her husband or kids name and there is little to no dialogue at all. This made it hard for me to understand some of her relationships though, especially the one with her husband and with her students.

As an educator (and a runner) there were moments of this book that her pain felt almost too raw for me. I thought the writing was really effective and I liked that there was some healing achieved by the end of the novel.

Side note: Her fixation on her lost and painful friendship took up a fair amount of the story and I didn’t find it very interesting.

I only made it half way through this book. The story was dry and I found the writing boring. I kept waiting to find out what the actual plot was but nothing ever materialized. This was disappointing given the positive feedback I had heard about the book.

Sex and lust are notoriously difficult topics to write about, but Lynn Seger Strong nailed the concept of desire (no pun intended). As a former university student in NYC, I identified with any and all of the conflicts so artfully depicted in this book. I am so grateful for the opportunity to have read something so well-executed and resonant. Hands-down one of my favourite reads in 2020.

While I have certainly seen a variety of reviews for this one, I enjoyed it enough. I appreciated the deep-dive into the main characters life, but I was also bored and annoyed with the Groundhog effect of it all. Her obsession with running and leaving work early, never being available to her family, and these weird flashbacks to her childhood friend just felt lazy after awhile.

‘Want’ is a stream of consciousness novel about a married mother in her mid-thirties struggling financially in New York City. The narrator and her husband are well-educated and come from privileged backgrounds, but they struggle with employment and making ends meet and file for bankruptcy. ‘Want’ highlights the hardships that many Millennials face, but I had a hard time reading this as the narrator is often self-involved, detached, and immature. It was so frustrating to see her make poor choices day in and day out regarding her job and spending money she didn’t have. She is the sole provider for her family and holds two jobs, high school teacher and part-time professor. There’s not a lot of action in the first half of the novel and I only started becoming more interested after I’d finished about 2/3 when she begins to focus on those who are close to her. I found the novel soared towards the end, warming me to it.

Thank you NetGalley and Henry Holt & Co. for providing this ARC.

This was a hard read. I am a new mom, and some of the anxieties in this book made me feel like I was holding a mirror up to myself. But this was a necessary read. Beautifully written and incredibly profound. Women and mothers are warriors.

I found it hard to identify with the main character, thus, had difficulty continuing to read and empathize with her situation and choices she made. The writing style seemed slightly disjointed, and the author appeared to jump from one topic and character to another, with little tying the plot together. The overall storyline of a 30-something year old wife/mother with a PhD, but stuck in adjunct positions, was depressing and lacking in any sort of hopefulness. It could possibly have been better, had US/world conditions been different at the time of publication.