• Features
  • New Books
  • Biggest New Books
  • Fiction
  • Non-Fiction
  • All Categories
  • First Readers Club Daily Giveaway
  • How It Works
 
 
 
Features
New Books
Biggest New Books
Fiction
Non-Fiction
All Categories


Boomer1

Daniel Torday

Buy Now

Buy From a Local Bookstore
Publisher
St. Martin's Press
Date
September 18, 2018
Fiction
Mystery, Crime, & Thriller
After his academic job search, his journalistic career, and his marriage proposal go down in flames, an angry young man moves into his mother's basement and starts a radical movement that pits millennials against baby boomers.

Embed our reviews widget for this book

What is this?
Positive
Based on 7 reviews

Rave

Positive

Mixed

Pan

What The Reviewers Say
Rave Emily Bobrow,
The Wall Street Journal
Mark Brumfeld is angry. At 31 he is jobless, jilted and deep in debt ... There, in the basement bedroom of his youth, he spawns the Boomer Boomers, a revolutionary group of unemployed millennials who accuse baby boomers of selfishly clinging to all the good jobs. 'They were meant to retire at the age of sixty-five,' Mark declares in the first of many homemade videos to go viral. 'And they have not retired. They have not' ... For a book animated by the gripes of young people, it is interesting that the most fully realized character here is Julia. Mark’s mother...Her story highlights some of the fatuousness of making broad generational generalizations, not least because most female boomers have had less agency than their daughters. She also poignantly illustrates the slow but steady creep of time, and the way 'old' age often arrives as a surprise. Mr. Torday has written this book with verve, but it would have been nice if he had slowed down a bit. Mark and Cassie’s relationship feels rushed, and some of their choices seem more convenient than plausible. Still, Boomer1 is a sharp, bright and often amusing snapshot of this unwieldy economic moment.
Read Full Review >>
Positive Olivia Sudjic,
The New York Times Book Review
It’s hard to tell where the book’s sympathies lie—it reads as contemporary satire with Shakespearean echoes—but the baby boomers’ own verdict is 'meshugas.' Torday reveals the artificiality of all identity markers, from given names to generational monikers ... Many of the book’s best passages explore the collapsing of time—decaying leaves become 'a synaptic palimpsest'—and from the old songs [protagonist] Mark and [ex-girlfriend] Cassie cover to the new names they take, the hybridization of past and present permeates the novel, complicating any division between 'us' and 'them.'
Read Full Review >>
Positive Niko Maragos,
The Millions
Arriving almost exactly seven years after the first Occupy Wall Street protests, Boomer1 reimagines that movement as a decentralized, dark-web-conspired wave of 'generational domestic terrorism.' In this case, it’s not the 1 percent against the 99 percent, but baby boomers against millennials, the latter camp having been been radicalized by the video missives of angry, unemployed, and masked YouTuber 'Isaac Abramson,' who is actually not a millennial but identifies as one ... Torday’s book is eerily prescient of the America we’ve struggled to reckon with since Nov. 9, 2016, and all the more unsettling even in spite of its clever humor:...Only two years ago, social media was still vaguely and cheerfully 'democratizing' instead of undermining democracy itself, and 'leaning in' was what people were saying women had to do to be taken seriously. With or without the current situation, that former self-deceptive tech utopianism could have never lasted because nothing does, even for youth who’ve grown up with a sense of mastery over history. That’s the melancholy theme that runs through this book from beginning to end, which Torday focalizes through the sad character of Mark’s mother, Julia. Reflecting on her own childhood in suburban Philadelphia at the dawn of the postwar boom times, she recalls 'the beginning of a period, an era, that appeared then to have no limit.'
Read Full Review >>
See All Reviews >>

SIMILAR BOOKS
Fiction

Rave

Positive

Mixed

Pan

The Overnight Kidnapper
Andrea Camilleri, Trans. by Stephen Sartarelli
Positive

Fiction

Rave

Positive

Mixed

Pan

Careless Love: A DCI Banks Novel
Peter Robinson
Positive

Fiction

Rave

Positive

Mixed

Pan

The Next to Die
Sophie Hannah
Positive

Fiction

Rave

Positive

Mixed

Pan

The Shaker Murders
Eleanor Kuhns
Positive

Fiction

Rave

Positive

Mixed

Pan

Rupture: An Ari Thor Thriller
Ragnar Jonasson
Positive


What did you think of Boomer1?
  • About
    • Get the Book Marks Bulletin

  • Categories
    Fiction
    Fantasy
    Graphic Novels
    Historical
    Horror
    Literary
    Mystery, Crime, & Thriller
    Poetry
    Romance
    Speculative
    Story Collections
    Non-Fiction
    Art
    Biography
    Criticism
    Culture
    Essays
    Film & TV
    Graphic Nonfiction
    History
    Investigative Journalism
    Memoir
    Music
    Nature
    Politics
    Religion
    Science
    Social Sciences
    Sports
    Technology
    Travel
  • Lithub Daily

      February 22, 2019

      • A 160-year-old letter details the decline of Dickens' marriage.
      • A Kickstarter campaign for women-centric literary postcards.
      • Plans for an Austen memorial in the UK were scrapped.
      • A profile of Haymarket Books.

© LitHub