Thursday, October 5, 2017

The Future Won't Be Long.


New York City, 1986, Baby is newly arrived from Wisconsin, without friends, job or a place to stay until a chance meeting on the street with wealthy student Adeline leads to her taking him under her wing and letting him move into her NYU dorm room. Over the next ten years their unlikely friendship falls apart and comes together again as they navigate their way through relationships, nightclubs and the world of arts and letters where they encounter many of the real life characters who helped shape the city's downtown scene. 

I'm interested in the era of New York that the author depicts and I find that it's always fun to read about places that you know well. 
I loved the characters of both Baby and Adeline, (Adeline had a strangely affected cadence of speech which should have annoyed me but managed not to) and I willed for them both to succeed and get their friendship back on track.

I enjoyed the author's writing style and there were other characters and anecdotes that were fascinating but The Future Won't be Long is a lengthy 400 page read and although I enjoyed (even loved) the first hundred and last hundred pages I found that the middle couple of hundred were a bit of a slog to get through - they had a tendency to meander and seemed somewhat superfluous.
Ultimately I feel that this was one of those books that could have done with a strict edit - if it were half the length it would have been a five star read for me, as it stands it's more like a three.





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