Blair's Reviews > There's Going to Be Trouble

Barely a day goes by that I don’t think about Jen Silverman’s We Play Ourselves, so this was easily one of my most highly anticipated books of the year. Like Cass in Play, Minerva (known by the nickname Minnow) is a woman fleeing scandal. All but fired from her teaching job, she seizes the chance to take up a role in Paris, where she starts a relationship with a colleague 15 years her junior. Charles is the son of a wealthy and influential family, but he’s also a passionate activist who’s become embroiled in the gilets jaunes movement alongside his mercurial friend Luc. Unbeknownst to her, Minnow’s choices have parallels to those of her father, Christopher, long before she was born. In a parallel storyline, set 50 years earlier, we follow a young Christopher as he’s swept up in student protests at Harvard and falls in love with firebrand campaigner Olya.

This premise isn’t necessarily something that would have got my attention on its own, but with Silverman’s name attached, I was interested – and I’m so glad I was, because this is a masterfully crafted novel. The author’s background as a playwright seems to influence her writing in the best way: her ear for dialogue is matched only by her ability to write a perfect setpiece. So we get great, plausible debates between the characters; smart, snappy, but also believable as things people would actually say. Silverman has a gift for making something new and startling out of a cliche (it’s a tiny detail, but this book has possibly the best ‘parent meeting their new baby’ scene I’ve ever read). At times, the book is unexpectedly open – the mystery of what sent Minnow to Paris is dealt with swiftly, rather than being held back and used as a plot twist. The characters act in frustrating ways, and both central relationships seem obviously doomed to fail, but I don’t think we’re meant to be rooting for anyone here; this is a story about making mistakes and what happens afterwards, whatever that means.

I received an advance review copy of There’s Going to Be Trouble from the publisher through Edelweiss.