Forty year old Andrea Bern is single and lives in Brooklyn. She has stopped making art and hates her corporate office job (but she likes her co workers). She has a fractured relationship with her family and doesn't make the best choices when it comes to boyfriends.
All Grown Up recounts a series of events and encounters in Andrea's life and as the book progresses we discover more about her family background, her dating history, and her friendships which help us understand who she is today.
There's no real plot in All Grown Up and the episodes jump backwards and forwards in time. It is a character driven novel and it's all about Andrea.
I loved Jami Attenberg's previous two books and although I didn't dislike this one it failed to captivate me as her other books have. I love her writing and parts of this were very good but I found it to be a little inconsistent with some dull chapters here and there.
On the whole I'm not a fan of character driven novels, I think that they need to be very strong to succeed so perhaps that is partly to do with how I felt about this book.
All Grown Up is rather short, not even 200 pages, so it was a quick read that I didn't regret, I was just expecting a little more as I had loved the author's previous works so much.
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