Genre: Contemporary Fiction
Length: 352 pages
Audiobook Length: 8 hours and 3 minutes
First Published: 2020
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Rachael’s Review
When Charlotte Perkins wins a Mediterranean cruise, she convinces her grown children to come along hoping to reunite her estranged brood. Can these four adults find common ground among the sights of Europe, or will family drama and past secrets continue to drive them apart? After only a few chapters, I found myself so frustrated by the choppy writing and annoying narrator that I decided it wasn’t worth my time.
Publisher’s Description
When seventy-year-old Charlotte Perkins submits a sexy essay to the Become a Jetsetter contest, she dreams of reuniting her estranged children: Lee, an almost-famous actress; Cord, a handsome Manhattan venture capitalist who can’t seem to find a partner; and Regan, a harried mother who took it all wrong when Charlotte bought her a Weight Watchers gift certificate for her birthday. Charlotte yearns for the years when her children were young, when she was a single mother who meant everything to them.
When she wins the contest, the family packs their baggage—both literal and figurative—and spends ten days traveling from sun-drenched Athens through glorious Rome to tapas-laden Barcelona on an over-the-top cruise ship, the Splendido Marveloso. As lovers new and old join the adventure, long-buried secrets are revealed and old wounds are reopened, forcing the Perkins family to confront the forces that drove them apart and the defining choices of their lives.
Can four lost adults find the peace they’ve been seeking by reconciling their childhood aches and coming back together? In the vein of The Nest and The Vacationers, The Jetsetters is a delicious and intelligent novel about the courage it takes to reveal our true selves, the pleasures and perils of family, and how we navigate the seas of adulthood.
Quotes from The Jetsetters
Somehow her later years had become a mirror of her lonely childhood.
Did all siblings revert to their childhood selves when they were together, or was there a way to transition to functional adulthood even while being in one another’s lives?
This was one of the pleasures of recovery: you opened the door to the pain and gnawing tedium, but joy came in as well. All of it, all of it, brilliant and clean and true.
Martyrdom was a hard habit to break.
About Amanda Eyre Ward
Amanda Eyre Ward is the author of eight novels, including How to Be Lost, The Same Sky, Sleep Toward Heaven, The Lifeguards, and The Jetsetters. She currently lives in Austin, Texas, and Ouray, Colorado. Visit the author’s website →
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