As an exclusive non-fiction reader trying to ease his way back to fiction, I am picking the fiction books in our home library one by one. There are those that are hard to read, and then there are those whose prose feels like a beautiful dance to the eyes. The Nest was of the latter kind. Cynthia D’aprix Sweeney utilizes a wide vocabulary range to describe every scene, character, and side story beautifully, and the storyline pulls you in and engages you to the core. The main storyline is that of a dysfunctional family with four siblings all having significant financial problems. They come from a wealthy family with a substantial trust fund that is supposed to be available when the youngest sibling turns 40. And right before the long-expected 40th birthday, an accident limits the access to the trust fund. The siblings are now forced to work together to resuscitate the money, and in parallel, learn to live with the realities of a potential life without the promised fortune. The book contains multiple parallel stories – a messy and nasty divorce, an entrepreneur wasting his entire fortune, teenage girls discovering their sexuality, strict moms realizing how they have to cool down, a firefighter dealing with his loss, and Ms. Sweeney ties all the stories together through the trust fund.
One big surprise for me was realizing that the author does not have a Wikipedia page. Her social media presence includes Twitter with 3,000 and Instagram with 5,000 followers. This is typically not the case for New York Times best-seller writers. The reason is unknown to me and apparently, I missed my chance of asking Ms. Sweeney personally when she was in Washington, DC for the book tour of her second book: Good Company. For now, I’ll plan to read her new novel and enjoy her beautiful writing style.
