George and Lizzie’s love affair, if you could call it that, is messy and, more importantly, human. As people, they could not be more different … Pearl...weaves Lizzie and George’s past and present effortlessly and constructs a narrative that connects with the reader. Lizzie and George are not just fully fleshed out characters but familiar. Pearl skillfully explores love in its many facets — true, unrequited, long-standing, parental, platonic and love for oneself. In the end, George & Lizzie is a tribute to love, warts and all.
Sailing along with George & Lizzie, I often clutched at its sides, sure the vessel’s rigging was off-kilter. Occasionally I felt queasy, unsure of the direction we were heading. But the prose was sturdy and the subject matter provocative. Pearl makes regular references to other books, and I clung to our shared favorites (like Dodie Smith’s old-fashioned tale of English girlhood, I Capture the Castle) as if to a life preserver … Offering oneself up for the pleasure of a team of football players has to be one of the weirdest premises ever devised for a romantic novel. Pearl’s steering may be off, but let it not be said that she’s afraid of uncharted waters.
At heart, the book is the story of the couple’s marriage and the question of whether Lizzie can transcend her emotional walls, but we learn the details through storytelling vignettes that smoothly spool back and forth through time. That style and the 1990s setting lend the story a slightly formal, old-fashioned quality, allowing plot twists that 21st-century advancements might have eliminated … The pace is abrupt at the very beginning, then settles down to a relaxed back-and-forth survey that skims through the character’s lives, inching the story forward here and pausing to develop a detail there. It’s a surprisingly delicious read considering how many of the main plot points are revealed in the first few pages.
In classic rom-com style, Pearl’s titular protagonists collide at an Ann Arbor, Michigan, bowling alley, where stoned and brokenhearted college student Lizzie manages to irredeemably sabotage dental-school freshman George’s dream date and near-perfect game. The novel spins back to reveal this fated couple’s diametrically different childhoods … Through knotty predicaments both sorrowful and hilarious, Pearl dramatizes a complicated and deeply illuminating union of opposites and conducts profound inquiries into the self, family, empathy, and love. The result is a charming, edgy, and many-faceted novel of penetrating humor and resonant insight.
In this debut novel about love, regret, and forgiveness [Pearl] tries her hand at fiction with mixed results ... Pearl doesn’t give readers enough time to witness the deepening of George and Lizzie’s relationship for it to be convincing, and at times the characters seem out of step with the realities of 1990s-era early adulthood. Still, the path George and Lizzie’s relationship takes toward wholeness points to truths about the way people self-sabotage, the complexity of love, and the importance of being able to let go of the past.
Lizzie Bultmann, the protagonist of celebrity librarian Pearl’s debut novel, is the daughter of a pair of famous behavioral psychologists at the University of Michigan who raised her not as a loved one but as an experimental subject. Partly because she wants them to 'wake…up enough to finally see her' for the extremely unhappy person she is, and also because she somehow thinks it will be fun, she embarks on what she calls The Great Game, in which she has sex with all 23 starters of her high school football team, one per week ... There’s a fairy-tale quality to the narrative voice and extreme premises of this book that some will find endearing.
