Cutting Teeth
A Novel
-
- $11.99
-
- $11.99
Publisher Description
One of the most anticipated debut novels of 2014, Cutting Teeth takes place one late-summer weekend as a group of thirty-something couples gather at a shabby beach house on Long Island, their young children in tow.
Nicole, the hostess, struggles to keep her OCD behaviors unnoticed. Stay-at-home dad Rip grapples with the reality that his careerist wife will likely deny him a second child, forcing him to disrupt the life he loves. Allie, one half of a two-mom family, can't stop imagining ditching her wife and kids in favor of her art. Tiffany, comfortable with her amazing body but not so comfortable in the upper-middle class world the other characters were born into, flirts dangerously, and spars with her best friend Leigh, a blue blood secretly facing financial ruin and dependent on the magical Tibetan nanny everyone else covets. Throughout the weekend, conflicts intensify and painful truths surface. Friendships and alliances crack, forcing the house party to confront a new order.Cutting Teeth is about the complex dilemmas of early midlife—the vicissitudes of friendship, of romantic and familial love, and of sex. It's about class tension, status hunger, and the unease of being in possession of life's greatest bounty while still wondering, is this as good as it gets? And, perhaps most of all, Julia Fierro's warm and unpretentious debut explores the all-consuming love we feel for those we need most, and the sacrifice and compromise that underpins that love.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Debut novelist Fierro tells a story about the obsessive, competitive, and neurotic behavior of parents in their 30s. The focus is four families who venture to a Long Island beach house for Labor Day weekend. Nicole, a paranoid pot smoker, is trying to avoid taking Zoloft again; Allie and Susanna are newlyweds and expecting; Rip is a stay-at-home father who argues with his wife about buying his little boy a princess dress; Leigh is an heiress trying to maintain the pretense that she has not, in fact, lost her family fortune. Finally, there is Tiffany, who always has the last word and consistently wears the least amount of clothing among the weekenders. As the melting pot of personality churns and Tiffany's appetite for wreaking havoc grows, jealously, betrayal, and regret slowly overpower any possibility for relaxation. Even though this story is framed to be a cozy and comical slice of life, Fierro's attempts to relate to the current age of parenting ultimately fall short.