Mildly weird, incredibly funny (at least to me...), fun read. Keen is... something else for sure. Minnow is my dearest.

I really enjoy stories that have dual timelines and I am a fan of a historical fiction on occasion and this was not a disappointment. There’s Going to Be Trouble has a gripping plot, and characters that draw you in. I definitely recommend!

This has dual timelines focusing on an intriguing topic, protests and relationships. Minnow is in 2018 and Keen in 1968. Both have similarities but are dealing with completely different areas. I found this to be incredibly interesting.

Great writing and fantastic characters. However, I can't say I loved the characters themselves. It's definitely a love-hate relationship there. I feel like this story is missing something, particularly with it ending the way it did. But, I can't help but recommend this as a wonderful piece of fiction.

Out April 9, 2024!

Thank you, Netgalley and Publisher, for this Arc!

Thank you to NetGalley and Random House Publishing for the advanced copy of There's Going to be Trouble by Jen Silverman!

In this dual-timeline novel, we follow Minnow as she navigates life abroad after being fired from her job in the southern U.S. and her father Keen 50 years prior as he meets her mother and gets caught between the scientific community and war.

I love, love, loved Minnow’s story and her relationship with Charles (reverse age-gap for the win), Luc, and her fellow professors. Looking back on what led her to France was so interesting and thoughtful. The events mirrored between 1968-9 and 2018-9 really sealed the deal on this book for me. I loved it!

The ONLY qualm I had was the ending of the book. I felt like it was too abrupt and did not wrap everything up and give the reader enough closure on the story. It would've been 5 stars if not for that.

Thank you for The ARC! Unfortunately, this was not the book for me. HOWEVER, this is a personal preference and has nothing at all to do with the writing or the story. I think that I cover requested this because hello that cover is 👩🏼‍🍳💋 but it was too much on the historical fiction side for my liking. I think this is perfect for people who love historical fiction and that it will be well liked by several readers!

I’ve been putting this off because the chapters are long but I just read for three hours straight so! Dual timelines of a father and daughter falling for activists and getting involved in protests that have serious consequences. Omg Even thinking about this I’m just like wow this is so smart. Very enjoyable to read very well written very good PARALLLELS, and shocking tbh. Also gorgeous cover. I really really really enjoyed this Like so much and I requested this because I liked We Play Ourselves and I liked this even better.

Thank you to Netgalley and Random House for the ARC!

I’d say it took me a while to get into this book, but I’m not sure I ever did. The story jumps back and forth between 1968 and 2018 - looking at two times of political unrest and protests and how a father and his daughter have similar life-changing events within their respective movements.

The writing was undeniably strong, and I appreciated the insightful social commentary and the exploration of political activism and protest, though I’m not sure about the final takeaway. Both timelines held their own intrigue, complementing each other well and adding depth to the story.

However, considering one of the central themes revolved around how personal relationships shape our politics and actions, I found the interpersonal dynamics lacking. The romantic relationships, in particular, fell flat and failed to convince me.

This was a nice change for me. It took me longer than normal to get into this book. I don't read a lot of political leaning books so I am sure that is why. After about 100 pages I really began to love it.

Took me a while to get into, but ended up really enjoying this one. I don't read a lot of books with a focus on politics or activism so this was different for me, but a nice change!

An arresting novel about revolution that packs a punch like no other. I was a big fan of Jen Silverman’s previous novel, and I really love how she is able to blend two timelines/POVs into a sort of a jigsaw puzzle of a character study. It’s obvious that she has a lot of empathy for her characters, and writes them with care.

The story goes from calm to batshit insane at a moment’s notice, and I truly did enjoy the ride that it took me on.

Jen Silverman's There's Going to Be Trouble is a timely and thoughtful story about activism and its limits, as well as the inner lives of the people involved in such movements. A novel that links the past to the present, I found it a fascinating and engaging read all the way around, though I admit that I am immediately drawn to books that center on the inherent contradictions of political movements fighting for a better world.

I went back and forth between 3.5 and 4 and though I rounded up, I would say 3.5 is more accurate. The concept intrigued me--I enjoy dual timeline stories, especially when there is some historical aspect to them (which is typical with that type of book). This was barely historical fiction for me because the first, earlier time period occurred during my lifetime but I owe that to being old. The first timeline took place during protests in the late 1960s and the second more recent in Paris--which also intrigued me since I went to Paris last year and I loved knowing the places that were referenced and I also saw protests while I was there last April. The two timelines were about two seemingly apolitical people in love with individuals were were very political and heavily involved in radical protests. One of the seemingly apolitical characters seemed to be revealed later on to be more political than previously shown and I think was was something that was sprung upon the reader and when it was, I did not quite understand. The second character was shown to have been changed both during and after and I felt like this could have been explored a bit more. At some point, I caught on to the connection between the two timelines but I wonder if more could have been done with that too or if I just missed the clues.
It was a little slow in spots around the middle of the book.
All in all, a good read; I would was expecting just a little bit more.
Thanks to NetGalley and Random House Publishing for providing me with a copy of this book.

Thank you NetGalley and Random House Publishing Group - Random House for the copy of There's Going to Be Trouble by Jen Silverman. I loved the description of this book but just couldn't get engaged in the stories or the characters. This was not the book for me, but I think people who alive reading about political protests and effecting change will love it.

Yeesh, this one took me a long time to get into, and an even longer time to finish; as such, all my thoughts and opinions on it feel sapped of their strength and fervour, and I leave it behind feeling unsure whether I liked it, disliked it, or something else entirely.

So!

The writing was quality, and I loved the social commentary and focus on politics, protests, and activism.

This is the first "dual timelines" story that I've read in a long time where I felt that both timelines were individually intriguing, successfully informed each other, and were necessary to the story.

That said, given that one of the main themes of the book seemed to be how personal relationships inform our politics, values, and beliefs -- and, thus, the action we are compelled to take (or not take) on their behalf -- I was underwhelmed by the relationships and connections on display here, in particular the two "romantic" relationships, which felt flat and unconvincing.

Also, that ending was hella abrupt.

I went into this title without knowing the premise, and was very pleasantly surprised! It took me a bit of time to really get into the story and be invested, but some parts did have me very engrossed. The writing was truly beautiful on Jen Silverman's part and I did like the two storylines paralleling one another. However, the ending felt a bit rushed and abrupt, and I would've liked it to be more fleshed out.

Thank you to NetGalley and Random House for this title!

ARC provided by NetGalley.

It has been a long time since I read something so sincere and tender. Reading this novel in the midst of the Palestinian genocide, when my own college is so heavily restricting any kind of protest, made it so much more relevant and horrifying.

Usually, when people say that they go away from a book with more questions than answers, they present it as a critique, but in this case it is the highest compliment I can give. This novel posed so many pertinent queries about what it is to live in a broken world and its political system and how to find the balance between self-preservation and the duty to seek change. It made me re-evaluate my own outlook on protest, on hope and on drawing the boundaries between the individual and the political (and whether there are any).

All of these discussions were put forward through a compelling dual-narrative plot with a greatly interesting cast of characters. The writing style was beautiful and the two perspectives were handled so well - even though I am not usually a fan of multiple POVs, it felt so necessary in this case to really showcase the generational aspect of the issues surrounding this book.

Honestly, just… wow. Everyone concerned for the state of the world needs to read this, right now.

I kept pausing while I was reading “There’s Going to be Trouble,” the most personally involving novel I’ve read in some time, to study author Jen Silverman’s photo and marvel at how someone so seemingly young – decades younger than I, anyway – could have gotten down so viscerally the Vietnam-era times of my early adulthood, a time you’d think would be as distant for members of Silverman’s generation as, say, World War I, would be for mine. Indeed, even closer, perhaps, the Great War, to my experience than Vietnam for Silverman’s, with the print-to-digital transformation and other seminal changes over the years that have made today’s world so different from even a quarter century ago, let alone the half-century now that it’s been since the Vietnam War.
No simply googling “Vietnam” for me and others of my college generation, after all, as we sought to find out more about the foreign involvement that was already shaping up to be the quagmire that it would become – the Vietnam of Silverman’s novel – but about which the only in-depth sources of information at the time were newspapers and magazines, which, by the time we saw them, unlike instantaneous Google feeds today, were already dated. There was TV news, of course, but in those days it was delivered in only 15-minute snippets, and there wasn’t that much opportunity for me to watch it anyway, with how preoccupied we all were with our studies in those days when college profs took no prisoners in their grading – another difference, it would seem, from today, when everybody passes.
One benefit, though, for my being on campus rather than back home carousing with my non-college-bound high school buddies was the opportunity to hear learned disquisitions on events of the day from visiting lecturers, including, and here my memory may not be serving with how long it’s been, a U.S. undersecretary of something or other named George Ball. And indeed there’s a Ball-type authority on Vietnam in Silverman’s novel, one Andrew Hungerford, who comes to the campus of the novel, as Ball with me, to offer his perspective on the war, with the difference being that Ball came to be known for his strong opposition to the war – maybe that’s what makes me want to believe it was he I heard, with my even-then disaffection with the war – while Hungerford comes on both guns blazing, so to speak, in support of the war.
So strong a proponent is he, indeed, of the war, so sure of the rightness of the cause, that his appearance prompts a student takeover of the building where he’s appearing, which will end up making for a paradigm shift, if you will, for the scientist-protagonist of Silverman’s book, Keen, a lab researcher for a Nobel Prize winner whose synthesization work, though seemingly innocuous (anything smacking of scientific research in those days was suspect), is regularly drawing student protests.
Which at first excites Keen, to think that something he's involved with is so noteworthy as to warrant such attention, but in the course of the novel he will become radicalized, both because of something traumatic for him that happens during the protest as well as his involvement with a fellow activist named Olya, with whom he will eventually father a child, descriptively named Minnow, who will go on to become the novel's second protagonist and, like her father before her, experience a moment of great personal trauma during a protest 50 years later.
Not in the States, though, her demonstration, but a continent away in Paris, where she ends up after fleeing an incident back home where, albeit with considerable reluctance, she agreed to provide transportation for a distraught young woman seeking an abortion. Enough it was, though, just her being the chauffeur, to make for a welter of consequences, including a rift with her father, her being pursued by a relative of the young woman, torrents of unwanted publicity, and, in a couple of the novel’s strongest scenes for me, sessions with a college dean who is all the more off-putting for the seemingly sympathetic air he strikes in counseling her about what he characterizes as her “role” in the abortion (her “role,” she responds, was to drive a car).
Reminiscent it was for me, the indignity that she suffers at the hands of the dean, of the protagonist’s scenes with a dean in Philip Roth’s novel, “Indignation,” where the stakes for the protagonist, as he steams under the dean’s inquisition, are heightened by the prospect, if he’s expelled, of his having to go to Korea – just as in Silverman’s novel, Keen faces the prospect of having to go to Vietnam.
All of which may be giving away too much, particularly the revelation that Minnow is Keen’s daughter, which in the book is a while coming, but I wanted to supply enough detail to show why the book was so personally involving for me, enough so that it had me revisiting places in my past that I’d thought I’d left behind decades ago and made for this being more of a personal essay than a review proper. But that’s a mark of a good novel, it seems to me, that it has a reader relating it to his own experience, which certainly was true of me with this novel, which, as I’ve said, I enjoyed very much overall, with my one possible quibble being that I’d have liked to have seen more done with an artistic thread suggested by the striking cover image of an artist’s portrait of a nude woman posed on red drapery. The picture does in fact show up late in the novel, but only briefly and not to my mind as completely and thematically integrated as it might have been.

I am so thankful to Random House Books, Jen Silverman, and PRH Audio for the #freeaudiobook (#PRHPartner) and the digital access before this baby hits shelves on April 9, 2024.

There's Going to be Trouble tells the story of a father and daughter who both find themselves caught in violent riot scenarios, protesting two very different social issues during their youth -- the father falls in love with the mysterious Olya and her crew as they protest the Vietnam war in 1968, and contribute to those efforts. In the future, his daughter, Minerva or Minnow, falls for a French man named Charles as they speak out against the rising fuel taxes and discrimination in Paris in 2018.

The father is quite protective of his daughter, for he sees many of Olya, his forever life partner and radical counterpart in Minnow, and wants her to be safe. Still, after many back-and-forth blowouts. and flashbacks and forwards, our paternal character learns to accept his daughter for who she is and what she fights for. This is a story about individualism and forgiveness in so many ways, and I couldn't get enough.

I would like to thank NetGalley and Random House for providing me with an advance e-galley of this book in exchange for an honest review. Look for it in your local and online bookstores and libraries on April 9, 2024.

If you enjoy reading about the 60s, this one is for you. This story covers the complexities of interpersonal relationships between two protagonists. The book explores the ramifications of war, activism, and a passionate love affair. The book was incredibly thought-provoking and has me looking to read more of Jen Silverman's books.