Island City

by Laura Adamczyk

A woman spills the story of her life to a bar full of strangers, in the acerbic first novel from Laura Adamczyk.

Anything can become the story of your life if you let it, and I suppose this became mine.

In Island City , a wry, wistful woman, estranged from her family, sells her belongings and moves back to her hometown in the Midwest. To her, it’s the “perfect place to give up.” She wants to get rid of everything―her stuff, her ambitions. Before making a “messy exit,” she holes up in a dark bar and tells her stories to an audience of indifferent strangers. There’s the time the river dried up and you could walk across its bed; the day her sister got clobbered at the nursing home; when her dad got cancer, then Alzheimer’s, then cancer again. Now she’s forgetting things the way he did, words slipping away. That third drink isn’t helping.

Laura Adamczyk, whose writing is “super weird” and “super unsettling” (Eugenia Williamson, The Boston Globe ), creates a full portrait of a person, even as the image blurs and fades. Delivered as a booze-soaked monologue, Island City is a funny, devastating first novel, one that bristles and burns with true feeling.

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary, Dark, Literary Fiction, Adult Fiction

288 pages, Paperback

First published March 14, 2023

Reviews

[Jasmine]

DNF at 25%.

The blurb states that a woman spills her life story to a bar full of strangers.

So, I thought this story would give off dark vibes with at least a little interaction with the strangers in the bar. But what I got was a dreary monologue from the narrator.

I stopped reading not long after the narrator described a woman as having “chunky t*ts” and “chicken legs.”

I could have kept reading because it is quite a short story, but I didn’t want to force myself.

Thank you to the publisher for providing an arc via Netgalley.

[Aaron Brown · Rating 4 out of 5]

A solid debut. It is a very unique format, a first person narrative from a middle-aged woman telling her life story at the local pub. I don't know that I have seen anything quite like that. The tone and diction, consequently, is very conversational, familiar. The result is a mixed bag. Given the choice to construct the novel and its narrative this way, it is very difficult to build any momentum in the story or get a real grasp for the characters other than the narrator. There is very little dialogue. But some of the stories and vignettes contained within the long narrative are fantastic. It can read at times like a long string of collected small stories and vignettes. I love the setting and love how the alcohol being consumed changes the storytelling. There is a lot to like, a lot to not like, but nothing to hate and, thus, I think it is a good effort for a first novel.

ARC from NetGalley

[Jason Pettus]

2023 reads, #46. DID NOT FINISH. I'm not sure why I was under this impression, given that I just read its synopsis again and realized it doesn't describe this book that way at all, but when I first heard about Laura Adamczyk's Island City and decided to put it on reserve at the Chicago Public Library, I thought it was going to be a crime noir story. Turns out, though, it's just another Dreary Plotless MFA Novel, about a woman whose father was an alcoholic who eventually got Alzheimer's, who's now a middle-aged alcoholic herself who has just been diagnosed with Alzheimer's as well, and is recounting her story to an unnamed bartender in a dive bar in the small town where she grew up. That'll be fine for people who are into those kinds of books, but I'm not one of them, so after 50 pages I ended up giving up rather quickly. If you don't like the absolute slowest titles of the already glacially slow genre known as "literary fiction," then you should stay away as well.

[Lindsay Hunter · Rating 5 out of 5]

At a certain point this book shifts into a gear that I was not expecting, and it took me to a place filled with emotion and joy even as it was so damn sad. Also, what a great ending.

[Sara Hughes · Rating 2 out of 5]

not an enjoyable book, messy and badly paced. i also absolutely hate when characters in books or tv are named “sister” or “boyfriend” just come up with a name you already named other characters!!

[nathan · Rating 3 out of 5]

READING VLOG

Major thanks to NetGalley and FSG Originals for this ARC in exchange for my honest review:

𝘖𝘧 𝘢𝘭𝘭 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘨𝘪𝘯 𝘫𝘰𝘪𝘯𝘵𝘴 𝘪𝘯 𝘢𝘭𝘭 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘵𝘰𝘸𝘯𝘴 𝘪𝘯 𝘢𝘭𝘭 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘸𝘰𝘳𝘭𝘥, 𝘴𝘩𝘦 𝘸𝘢𝘭𝘬𝘴 𝘪𝘯𝘵𝘰 𝘮𝘪𝘯𝘦.

She makes me the 𝘺𝘰𝘶 in the book, in the bar, near to the wild heart.

I’m listening. To the past. To the decorative details, too specific, too far from my empathy. I yawn a bit as she glosses over her sister, her dad, misremembering things, saying them as they aren’t. She’s drunk and unreliable. Saying them as she wished they happened.

Love, how it stretches and folds and mutilates itself and learns to regrow from a stub through the trauma we are born into, that dead ends at the chafing of the stub in a pain we only know when cul de sac’ed into the trap that is a family.

What is home? Do the memories we make shape us? Why are some details more important than others? Why do some come to mind faster? Because we care?

And there is care in the decorative details. They matter, as Adamczyk’s narrator mulls over them like seashells polished by sun and desperate eyesore. To savor, to keep close.

The story then loosens, paves a muddy road to why she is back in her hometown, here with you, and she is less of a flourish and more of a floundering of fight-or-die furies. Adamczyk is skilled at keeping us distracted in the sleight of hand in an unreliable narrator, only to let us fall flat in the ambush of love’s labor’s loss in honest representation of siblingship not often seen in literature. The way we save, the way we nurture. The way we stand up and all the ways we let slide. It’s a slippery slope, siblingship, but it’s the life raft and the destination all at once. Now I know what home means when I look at my own brothers.

The book softens with an aching melancholy that we know too well. And we empathize, lean in a bit closer, let the ice melt in our drinks, and settle into who she is. At her core.

And at her core she is us. Wanted. Needed. Loved.

[Juliana Niño · Rating 2 out of 5]

Island City is a novel told in second person to an audience (and you, the reader) at a bar in the narrator's hometown.

Our narrator starts from the beginning. She relays her whole life story, all leading up to where she ended up in life.

There really isn't much more to say.

You learn of our narrators trials and tribulations, her relationships with her parents and sister, and the way she ends up coping with her grief.

I enjoyed the writing style, and there were moments of brilliant clarity. As well as an astute exploration of the bond between sisters. Buttttttt...there just wasn't enough to make me feel like the ending was worth all that build-up. This reminded me of My Year of Rest and Relaxation in how I felt bamboozled by the end.

Good writing, but alas, I didn't find this to be an enjoyable or enlightening read.

Thanks so much to NetGalley and FSG for this ARC in exchange for my honest review! (:

[Em H. · Rating 5 out of 5]

[4.5 stars rounded up]

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for an e-arc of this book!

I really loved this novel, both in style and in substance. The way the story is told--through second person as our main character relates her life to folks in her hometown bar with her--was so effective for me, because the story unravels in a way that mimics memory. There are flash forwards to the past and the future, digressions about things that aren't really relevant to the story being told, reflections about what's happening through the future lens...and it all worked so well. The craft of this novel is extremely well done.

I think if you don't care about the family in this novel, it's just not going to work for you. There's really no plot. We learn more about our main character, her sister, her mother, and her father (as well as her stepdad, later on) as she gets closer to what she feels is the moment when her life changed and set her on a path she can't escape from: her father dying. But there's no plot outside of her sitting in the bar telling her life story. This novel depends on the character work and the reader feeling emotionally invested in this family, which I was.

The novel handles some hard themes in it, and I thought it did it well. The way the character speaks of her own malaise was well done and, again, felt authentic and realistic. I wish we had gotten maybe a chapter or two more, because the end does come rather swiftly, but the last line is also...chilling, in a way. It's quite a tragic ending, because the character is not in the best of places emotionally or mentally (TW for suicidal ideation) and the novel doesn't leave you with any answers as to what happens next.

Big CW for the dad dying if that's something you've gone through. There were some similarities to my own experience (a lot of this novel felt eerily relatable), so that was hard to read. If you're not in a great headspace to read that on the page, then I would recommend holding off on this novel until you're ready, if it's something you're interested in.

Definitely a novel I'll want to return to at some point.

[Aden · Rating 2 out of 5]

Don't have a ton of nice things to say, so I'll keep this review short considering its a debut. Messy, melodramatic, poorly-paced, dysfunctional. Bummer because the synopsis sounded so interesting.

[Lolly K Dandeneau · Rating 4 out of 5]

via my blog: https://bookstalkerblog.wordpress.com/
𝑰 𝒅𝒐𝒏’𝒕 𝒉𝒂𝒗𝒆 𝒂𝒏𝒚 𝒔𝒕𝒐𝒓𝒊𝒆𝒔 𝒍𝒊𝒌𝒆 𝒕𝒉𝒂𝒕, 𝒏𝒐𝒕𝒉𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝑰 𝒄𝒐𝒖𝒍𝒅 𝒕𝒆𝒍𝒍 𝒚𝒐𝒖 𝒕𝒉𝒂𝒕 𝒓𝒆𝒗𝒆𝒂𝒍𝒔 𝒎𝒆 𝒔𝒐 𝒔𝒖𝒓𝒆𝒍𝒚 , 𝒏𝒐 𝒆𝒂𝒓𝒍𝒚 𝒊𝒏𝒅𝒊𝒄𝒂𝒕𝒊𝒐𝒏 𝒐𝒇 𝒎𝒚𝒔𝒆𝒍𝒇 𝒂𝒔 𝒎𝒚𝒔𝒆𝒍𝒇. 𝑰𝒕’𝒔 𝒂𝒍𝒍 𝒕𝒐𝒐 𝒄𝒐𝒎𝒑𝒍𝒊𝒄𝒂𝒕𝒆𝒅.

I reviewed Laura Adamczyk’s story collection 𝐻𝑎𝑟𝑑𝑙𝑦 𝐶ℎ𝑖𝑙𝑑𝑟𝑒𝑛 in 2018, hopeful that there would be a novel to follow. Enter 𝐼𝑠𝑙𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝐶𝑖𝑡𝑦, a gorgeous first novel, with writing that hooked me from the start. The narrator has moved back to her small Midwest hometown, she has given up everything and decided this is the place to fade away. Here she is of no consequence, it’s a place that lags behind. She spills her guts in a local bar to strangers and what follows is a playfully devastating decline into what brought her to such a morose state. I felt an echo of a distant past as she talked about her big sister, it rubbed up against old memories of being the youngest. As the distance between them grows, they go from being co-conspirators to strangers in adulthood. She confides that her mother and sister no longer live in Island City, as she keeps drinking, she loosens up and talks about her dad, the jokester and his death fifteen years ago. What happened to him feels like a demon lurking in the dark corners of her mind, waiting to pounce. Has she inherited his terrible forgetting? His disease?

It’s an emotional journey, a seesaw of highs and lows. Her slow retreat doesn’t come as a shock, it’s there in the way she assumes Sister will shoulder the harder responsibilities while she is blinded by pain. She admits, “I liked the feeling of observing without participating.” She learns fast that withholding her presence is a sharper sword than any other action, but what about disappearing from yourself? She knows exactly what event caused her sinking, it’s her father’s cancer, his dementia, the shock of witnessing the deterioration. It breaks her, it’s not something she can move on from. It is that much harder to bear when he hasn’t ever really been present, not fully. Reaching into the past, it’s moving when she wonders about how their father lives his days when her parents’ divorce, when she and her sibling aren’t there with him. The antics they get up to when children weren’t hovered over all the time, speaks of another world, begging the question how did any of us survive our ideas? The dynamics between the girls and their mother is a strange dance, that can feel like tenderness and punishment. So much of this novel speaks of her family’s misfortune, the pain they cause each other, the trickery of fate, the genetics she is terrified she won’t dodge. It felt like sitting with a lonely woman at the bar who just wants to talk, despite being someone who isn’t participating in the world. Some memories float up, with no purpose, just like they do in our heads. It’s as though the first part of the book is our narrator bracing herself for the rupture in her family. Rather than coming together, a split happens, as if she is saving them all from future anguish through estrangement. Her beginning and ending are shaved off, as she tells us, all she has is the middle and it seems she has become stuck there.

What befalls their father is the natural order of things but out of time, it feels cruel. There are still funny incidents, it’s a fact they use humor to keep from breaking down. The end can’t be put off and the aftermath is more pain and a sense of being rudderless. Will she end it all, or will Sister find her? Is there hope, even when she decided to give up?

It’s not a novel that explodes with action, but there is something cryptic and clouded in the memories she shares and that is what pulled me from the start. Maybe it’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but the style worked for me. It is hauntingly original and that Adamczyk can find warmth in a family that is almost embarrassed by need and weakness was my undoing. I will be following this author.

Publication Date: March 14, 2023

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

[J Earl · Rating 5 out of 5]

Island City, from Laura Adamczyk, is a novel I want to come back to in the future and see if I can read it in a different manner. I found this to be not only a good novel but one that gave me, as a reader, some flexibility in how I wanted to engage.

Maybe I should start with a brief explanation of what I mean by reading it in a different manner. Like any novel, this can be read from the perspective of simply a reader. Yes, we know we are reading what the other people in the bar are hearing, but we don't really think of ourselves as someone in the bar. We use that as a way to understand what the protagonist is saying and how it is being said. When I saw that this was a long monologue over the course of one evening, I made the decision to read it "as if" I was a patron in the bar. I imagined (using my own real-life experiences as a gauge) how her comments might sound if she was talking about my hometown. This worked very well for me and gave me perhaps a bit more ways into her personality.

If you simply want a "this then this" type novel you can read this as the story of her life with the understanding that it is conversational because she is (periodically) in actual dialogue and she considers her monologue to be something she is creating for and with those people. You may think these read mostly episodic if you don't grasp the bigger picture and the arc of both her life and the novel. It would, I think, be enjoyable even like that, but the strength of the novel is watching the change in the protagonist, both over her life and over the course of several drinks and an evening of what certainly seems like reflection, especially the further she gets (into her life story and into the alcohol).

Reading it while, for lack of a better term, role-playing a patron in the bar really, for me, brought a lot of the subtlety to the fore. Rather than just hear her describe life in the town, I imagined where I might have nodded along and where I might have thought she was exaggerating the town's role. While any novel is a joint effort between the author and the reader, I felt like I was given the opportunity to make this almost as much my creation as Adamczyk's. Though admittedly my part requires far less creativity and skill, but it did help to make the story speak more directly to me.

Even with how I chose to engage with the novel, I still found myself relating to aspects of her life, ways she felt about things that happened around her, and especially the times when torn between (largely chosen) helplessness and the guilt/remorse that comes from feeling you put too much on someone else's shoulders.

One part I found fun was figuring out some of the events/movies/people/etc she referenced without naming. I had to do a couple of searches but was happy when I recognized some almost immediately (Heath Ledger for example). Part of the fun was figuring it out, but part of the fun was thinking about how things that don't concern us directly factor into how we remember and make sense of our lives. Celebrities, shows, even commercials have served as markers along my life's path, and our protagonist is no different.

I would highly recommend this to readers who like stories that are both micro and macro in nature. By that, I mean we are trying to figure out her life as we read, yet we are also working on why she is in this bar, on this night, spilling her guts to these people.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.

[Michael Tichy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Adamczyk has such a beautiful, singular awareness of the smallest of details that compose our lives experience. Island City starts with a kind of benign, not unpleasant conversation. The kind of intimacy that we find in strangers, when confession carries with it no risk. It’s a compelling blend of humor and the relatable sense of an existential dead end, when disappointments have grown into a stack so large it obscures the view of much else. It grabs you and you want to know this stranger’s life, as validation, maybe as cautionary tale. And then, having made yourself captive to Adamczyk’s brilliant prose, she delivers the coup de grace. Such heartbreaking, poignant pain. Raw and unequivocal. I read this book straight through in one day. I couldn’t stop. A stunning achievement. I’ve been waiting for this book for a long time and it was well worth the wait.

[Macken · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thank you to NetGalley and FSG for the e-ARC! I did not think I would have a whole lot to say about this one considering the first 60% of this book had me considering a DNF. I had no idea how much the last 40% would carry it to a whole new level and bring it some strong redemption. Island City is a novel from a first person perspective as a drunk middle aged woman tells her life story. This point of view fluctuated between being an interesting concept in the synopsis to being punishingly long winded in the exposition and then to devastatingly real at the end. I did not expect to feel the emotional whiplash I’m feeling from this one but thank you to the reviewers that insisted on reading until the end.

[James B · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thanks to Netgalley and FSG for the ebook. This first novel is set in a bar where one of Island City’s daughters has returned to give the story of her life. It’s a story that no one has seemed to ask for and that no one seems to be able to stop. The narrator tells the story of her older sister, mother and father. He father left in a divorce, then later got cancer, developed early Alzheimer’s, then cancer again. Our narrator is also starting to forget words and things, so now she wants to get the full story of her life out before the end comes for her.

[Amanda · Rating 4 out of 5]

An unnamed woman sells everything, returns to her childhood hometown, and narrates a long monologue at the local bar. As she drinks more, her stories about family, grief, trauma, dementia, cancer, and alcoholism get sadder, yet she spirals into a clearer focus. The reality of growing up with divorced parents resonated.

[Erin Crane]

The artifice/device of the narrator telling the bar (us) her story as a monologue doesn’t quite work for me here. Her register varies too much (sounding very casual and then suddenly using words like “bemused”) and she gets too poetic. Someone in conversation isn’t going to sound like that, so it threw me off.

[Chanel Savant · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ok so the rumors are true and this is a sad book, but in a way that’s very #relatable.
It was a tale of detached sisterhood. One where there’s love and distance. An impossible loss, even one of a parent you’re not close to. The account of watching their dad die made me tear up in my workplace.
All in all a good book.

[Diane · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting format. I really wish the author had chosen ANY other way of referring to sister. Calling her “sister” the entire time made things read more juvenile than anything. I get the reasoning behind not using names, but “my sister” would have worked just as well without feeling like a callback to the Berenstain Bears.

[Elena L · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think this book is absolutely amazing! I never read something like this before and I enjoyed every moment of it. It is a heavy book emotionally so it’s either for you or it’s not but it was definitely for me. It was relatable (sometimes too relatable) but that’s actually something I enjoyed.

[JC Sevart · Rating 4 out of 5]

This one's fun! I mean, not in tone or plot or characters but it's a fun vibe for me. I like the idea of a framing narrative as a character drunkenly talking to a bartender and as someone with a lot of baggage with Alzheimer's stories like this will always resonate with me

[Annie · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was unexpectedly moving; I wept. Hard to rate as clearly I was very affected by this, but did not particularly enjoy it and found the narrator to be distinctly unlikable.

[Kelsey Weekman]

Based on the premise, I thought this would be dark and fun...and the cover made me think it would be modern and cool?! But instead we got something slow and only marginally interesting. Lol. I DNF.

[Alex · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is fantastic, and I would say that even if I hadn’t worked with Laura for almost eight years

[Nate Hawthorne · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some of the passages flowed. Others were a struggle to get through. Lots of similar life topics to my everyday world, just bumped up a notch. First hand look at grief and mental health struggles.

[Jan Taylor · Rating 3 out of 5]

well-written but very depressing. I can't pass this book on to anyone else because it might damage their life.

[Anna Thelen · Rating 2 out of 5]

Had some pithy quotes and keen insight, but the stream of consciousness writing lost me, and how she fades in and out due to her alcohol consumption was hard to follow and keep up with.

[Kylie Race · Rating 4 out of 5]

Super funny and dark. Loved her writing style and the clarity with which she expresses things that are vague. Very character heavy in a good way. I love vignettes

[Brea · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

[Vanessa · Rating 1 out of 5]

Went 50% and still struggled to enjoy it. DNF.

[Sara · Rating 2 out of 5]

meh. first person is tough.