Grand Rapids

by Natasha Stagg

A new novel from the celebrated author of Surveys, set in the Michigan suburbs of the early 2000s.

Installed alongside the Grand River in downtown Grand Rapids, Michigan, Alexander Calder’s public sculpture La Grande Vitesse has come to symbolize the city. Tess moves there from Ypsilanti, Michigan in 2001—the same year that her mother dies, when everything begins to move, for her, in slow motion. Thrust into adolescence nearly rudderless, fifteen-year-old Tess is intoxicated, angsty, and sexually awake. A decade later, inspired by diary entries and TV reruns, she remembers this summer in the suburbs as the one that redefined her. Its echoes of death are frozen in time like the waves represented in the Calder sculpture or the concrete steps leading down to the churning river. She comes to see Grand Rapids as a collection of architecture and emblems, another home to which she cannot return.

Genres: Fiction, Coming Of Age, Book Club, Novels

224 pages, Paperback

Published September 30, 2025

Reviews

[Gideonleek · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just like my life, except I am a man and twenty-six.

[Colette Celeste · Rating 1 out of 5]

The challenge with writing teenagers is not writing adultified children but in writing people who have the ambitions of adults but the limitations of children. Furthermore, the challenge is in writing children who do not represent an adult’s wish-fulfillment fantasy of what their childhood would have looked like if they were an adult back then. At some points, Stagg succeeds. The children of this story ask their parents for permission to go on rides to coffee shops, burn their friends CDs of cool older kid music, and even have the rare struggle with school. At other points, the libertine sensibilities and apathy of the characters seems more akin to a “young and lost in your twenties” story. Stagg’s greatest talent is with dialogue. She always shows just enough of a character’s actions to keep you paying attention without oversimplifying things. In this way I found the book very instructive. But the plot leaves a lot to be desired and in this way the book is classically underwritten. I don’t think it’s really enough to just make a quiet little portrait of a female unraveling anymore when there’s a million sensitively-drawn portrayals of white middle class people on the market. I put this book down for long periods of time before picking it up again and getting frustrated at how little the characters were developing, and how trivial all their interactions were. The grief of the protagonist is underwritten. Candy is meant to be this almost Rafaella Cerullo-like charismatic figure but instead comes off as a MPDG who prefers PJ Harvey to The Smiths. Any time the story had another listless sexual encounter between them I could feel my frustration growing. It’s not that the protagonist deserves better, it’s that I’m really not sure what Tess deserves, and neither is Stagg. How much sympathy are we supposed to have for Tess? Why is this her story? A stimulating but underdeveloped read.

[Rachel · Rating 3 out of 5]

I thought this was just ok but I do like when a book is set in the Midwest

[Jack · Rating 3 out of 5]

Difficult and sad and gross and depressing and all in a weird cloaked haze that feels less like a dream and more of a flash of memories accompanied by “I can’t believe that happened”. Lots of really really good sentences here. Loved it

[Ava · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don’t have adequate words to describe how good this is. Just read it! Please. I need someone to talk about it with.

[Mcbean · Rating 3 out of 5]

stagg is a good writer, but i keep wondering what exactly she’s trying to prove.

[michal k-c · Rating 3 out of 5]

sleepy prose that is particularly characteristic of "cool" "contemporary" literature but it serves more of a formal purpose here than simple detachment from the implied-reader. Adolescence can be a nightmare that people barely come out of alive, made all the worse by the actual alienation experienced on the fringes of mainstream society (like living in Grand Rapids), so on, so forth. In this sense the novel is totally competent and digestible, but doesn't really move the needle much for me

[Matt Bender · Rating 4 out of 5]

The grungiest of books. It’s a 90’s coming of age story set in Michigan that’s at least loosely based on Stagg’s on life. The major plot points are “sleeping with junkies, getting high, and having lesbian sex.” Normally, I wouldn’t finish a book like this, but Stagg’s great at diving into details and the novel feels so real and raw that the novel drew me into my own adolescence. It’s like on every page, I could see how pathetic some of the scenes I skated by must have been.

At its heart, the story exposes the void in a person’s life when there is no meaningful parenting and lots of reasons to be depressed. Stagg has emphasized the story is about friendships, but the friendships in this story are about as nice as a cigarette burn.

[Corey · Rating 5 out of 5]

not so grand

[Em Davenport · Rating 3 out of 5]

tbh did not expect to enjoy this as much as i did. it was dark and upsetting and depressing, but totally redeemable by the attention to detail and simile stagg has honed in on. there was a scene where she described the happiness a mother felt hearing hands streak the wooden bannisters of a staircase, and another about cigarette smoke in hair like seaweed in sea foam ugh. the dialogue was so bitingly simplistic, working in the favor of how out of body the main character, tess, is. there was one section at the beginning where she goes in to drill the age old question “where are you from?” and how it forms to the midwestern psyche and i knew that after reading that paragraph i was in for a ride. absolutely self-aware of itself as a book and perhaps that’s what made sections so hard to stomach, i appreciate the shamelessness and respect all it confesses. the characters didn’t really get to develop like how i desired, i was really hopeful for something moving to occur between candy and tess. perhaps that was the point tho, a whole lot of despair. somewhat inaccurate portrayal of teenagers. i felt some of tess’s inner thoughts were a tad too… mature? lived? often the way she spoke in her head was not the brain of a teenager, but a mid twenty-something. alas i could not put it down. jadore the formatting too.

[Franklin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pretty boring. But that seems intentional. Being a teenager is pretty bland when outlets to further expose you to the world, if you know the “world” is “out there,” are extremely limited. The dullness of drugs and burn out townies, etc etc are common place if you have known them. I found the reading experience to drag a lot and the style to be superficial, lots of characters all who don’t really develop substantially. Again maybe that’s the point, in a teenage daze how do you really get to know people in a year of jumping in and out of a place. The last few section’s prose became quite beautiful and detail unlike everything else. I wish it had all been as eloquent and full of life but,again, maybe that was the point, dull drug haze vs vivid reality outside that world. Drugs as plot device , esp a lackadaisical teen, just doesn’t interest me much.

[Greta]

really really really good. more new yorky scene reporters should return from whence they came in their fiction.

[Brumaire Bodbyl-Mast · Rating 5 out of 5]

I picked up this book during an especially shitty week at work and read it quite voraciously. Short chapters and simple prose make it very readable. People cope with the emptiness of suburbia in many ways. For most in West Michigan, the church is the obvious route. For others, communion and purpose is found in shattered connections with people you shouldn’t be with, doing things not worth doing. Sometimes there is a true connection that bursts forth, but it is often destructive and confusing. Other times, you may be left to brief, unsatisfying encounters (a futile offensive I often command in the sacred war against Heimweh.) Scenes of banal hell, of indistinguishable locales flash through your mind often, though none are really memorable. For me they certainly do, and as a semi Rapidian (I lived in the metro area prior to moving to the city proper) the city itself is always liminal, meant to be visited, not lived in. The satellite dirt cities are worse. Unlike the protagonist of the novel, I haven’t had some serious, life defining tragedy — nor am I still in high school, or even undergrad. I’m not on any medication either, unless you count HRT. I do however, deal with old people extensively, and I am all too familiar with the scenes of retirement homes, the copy pastas (though given the time the story takes place in, it’s old chain emails) the odd DMs from older men, and so on. It’s very relatable, even though her sense of geography is so different — her descriptions quite well encapsulate everything. I too, someday shall wake from the nightmare of Grand Rapids.

[Kia]

Sample size of 1 but I once asked a Michigander at a party if he’d ever met Betsy DeVos and he replied excitedly that he’d been to her lake house lots of times

Over the past five years I must have built up some sort of tolerance towards listless disaffected cool girl prose cause I liked this much better than surveys or maybe I’m just sad and miss the Midwest

[Amy Golden · Rating 4 out of 5]

A dark coming of age story. Tess hasn’t lived in Grand Rapids long when her mother dies and she finds herself living in her religious aunt’s basement. She’s depressed and she begins experimenting with anything that will make her feel something. The story is written from the perspective of her older self looking back on her time in Grand Rapids.

Stagg captures desperation, nihilism, and the suffocating atmosphere of a small mid-Western town.

[Faith · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5/5 “Sadness was a drug, to be mixed with other drugs until we couldn’t tell what came first, the rain or the lake.” Faithcore. Took me longer than it should’ve cause it started to depress me.

[Alexia · Rating 1 out of 5]

I don’t even understand what this was trying to be or do or say…skip it.

[Julie · Rating 1 out of 5]

I hated this book

[Olivia Stolzenthaler · Rating 1 out of 5]

“I didn’t know yet that I was moving back home, but sensed, perhaps, that Grand Rapids was a nightmare from which I was waking.”
I’m free!!
Author did a good job of making me feel as situationally unaware as Tess.

[Katie Pruden · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was really good

[Lilyanna D'Amato · Rating 3 out of 5]

A suburban coming of age ala Thirteen. It made me remember that keen sting of adolescent insecurity and abject placelessness, but I don't know that I'll ever really think about the book again.

[Lauren Vamos · Rating 3 out of 5]

Perks of being a wallflower with more drugs

[Isobel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well written book. Rough read. Very Michigan.

[Dev]

At times really felt like doing drugs

[D Lyons · Rating 5 out of 5]

Finally real representation for west michigan.

[Logan · Rating 4 out of 5]

solid little slice of midwest gothik

[bro do NOT text me · Rating 2 out of 5]

I didn't like Surveys At All -- a cool central idea with dogshit execution -- so I was annoyed that the draw of "home state mentioned" would Once Again pull me into Natasha Stagg's corpus. Grand Rapids is better than Surveys, but nine years later, this has still got first-book energy. Stagg is attempting to do something with these competing ideas of mortality, fatalism, and womanhood -- Tess' mother's death, Tess' mother's diary, Tess' job at the nursing home, the trajectory of Tess' aunt's family, the trajectories of Tess' extended social circle, the politician, etc. -- but nothing -- no plots, no characters, no critiques, no relationships -- is really developed enough for anything beyond "disaffection" to emerge. The setup of the book isn't devoid of potential, and for a while, I thought that maybe this was going to be a contender. Alas, I was wrong. There's this trope of the internet alt-girl canon where we're supposed to care that the main characters aren't saying or doing that much and the transgressions they suffer just hang and ferment like Fact. There are limitations to this approach, but I'm going to guess that much of Stagg's audience are too entranced by the promise of identification to engage with critiques of craft. Who am I to argue with that? By the halfway point I found myself on autopilot, barely discerning which minor character was which, and completely immune to the lurid teen delinquency arcs. I just wanted to be done with the fucking thing.
Honestly, though, I think that Stagg has the capacity to improve, if she just decenters her "Daria" narrators. To return to the "home state mentioned" tip, I think her best work here is Tess' aunt's arc. The subtle tensions in that home and how they ultimately play out (if you don't recall, Tess' cousins -- at the time of the stories in this book, offputtingly sincere, obligatorily evangelical, essentially nondescript middle-achieving white boys -- end up working for their father's construction company and post themselves sloppy drunk on weekends while Tess' aunt, recently divorced, lives alone in their old family home, succumbing to alcoholism and abandoned by her children) seem to offer room for a more coherent critique of the themes Stagg only gestures towards. I understand Stagg as good job of portraying Southeastern Michigan's (postindustrial pessimism) condescending attitude towards Southwestern Michigan (Protestant optimism), and that this helps elucidate some of the more minute tensions at play. I'll qualify that by saying 1.) that might be an unintended positive consequence of the Daria narrator and 2.) this is a prejudice that Stagg and I appear to share. My sense is that Stagg is a better observer than she lets herself show, and if she indulged herself with some blocky paragraphs of physical description or characters' inner monologues, she might be able to up her game. I think if someone did a 220 page, like, Jean Rhys-Jonathan Franzen thing, that'd probably play well. Just do that, Natasha. I know you're reading this.

[Shelli · Rating 5 out of 5]

Put this on my radar after a NY Times book review. Grand Rapids as a transplanted teen in 2001? Like really, having worked with teens during this time and being transplanted here at the age of 12 myself I had to know. What a damn ride...
At turns depressing, as Tess struggles and then succumbs to find ways to cope with the death of her mom, this one is real. Read it for the landmarks, try to discern that Berrylawn might be Heather Hills or Pine Rest. Understand that the Blues on the Mall description is surreal as well as the trip out to Lowell. Rich kids, poor kids, coffee shops on the West side and lying about the significance of the Calder. Stuck in this summer, is a teen who is trying to numb everything in lots of ways while her aunt and uncle who believe their money and religion can fix her but can't find her when cell phones were not the security blankets they are today. We all know this girl and this space, Natasha Stagg has been here and writes it true.

[Sophie · Rating 2 out of 5]

really really hated most of the book but most of the Grand Rapids descriptions were so dead on. Specifically obsessed with:

- The part about everyone knowing a devos or a vanandel
- Tess saying she’s never met a jew
- “West Michigan is the dead zone”
- Tess having a meg stalter “get me out of here” moment at meijer, specifically next to sandy the horse (also just how they are constantly going to and talking about meijer)
- All the jokes about everyone being Dutch and the politicians name being vandenberg
- “Bland crapids”
- The description of the downtown exit for GR tricking you into thinking it’s a big city

Also love that the author clearly changed forest hills to crescent hills but just left Rockford Rockford

[Ian Lewis · Rating 3 out of 5]

Such artful, flying prose of a bleak world. Emptying in a way. Horrible and cynical. But not without purpose, without presence. Stagg captures something here from a numb protagonist that always feels exciting, insightful, raw, but rarely joyful. Never freeing. A musing on a past but one that is never confident, never fully there - the narrator's lack of reckoning with her past only reveal her lack of reckoning with her present, with a dismal life surrounded by decay that she only briefly escapes from. It is a story she tells to us and, like many stories, one that tells much more about the teller.