Press
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"Sharp and contemplative … Gilmore has pulled off a remarkable feat: not of fusing the personal and the political but of showing why they’re so difficult to reconcile.”
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“These characters are crafted with care, conviction, and a little self-consciousness–which seems just as it ought to be.”
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“Rich and entertaining.”
— Elissa Schappell Vanity Fair
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“The woes of her characters mirror those of the nation: gone is the heady optimism of the sixties, replaced by disillusionment and ennui…Gilmore can be hilariously eviscerating.”
— The New Yorker
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“In this wonderfully funny and compelling story of a splintering suburban family, Gilmore has written an intimate social history of three generations of American Jews.”
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“As the Cold War ends, the Goldsteins of Washington, D.C., have regrets…Their kids show a knack for protest, suggesting it’s a trait that skips a generation – an idea Gilmore bolsters with a well-orchestrated denouement that turns the Goldsteins’ world inside out.”
—Sue Corbet, People Magazine
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“Delicious, complex and unexpected, Something Red (Scribner) is that impossible animal: a novel close to capable of being all things to everyone.”
– Linda L. Richards, January Magazine
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“Politics makes strong promises. It vows to right wrongs, improve our fortunes, protect our freedoms. For many in Washington, politics offers a noble purpose, a cause worthy of shedding sweat and even blood. Just how well politics lives up to these promises in individual lives is at issue in Jennifer Gilmore’s second novel, Something Red."
— Drew Bratcher, The Washingtonian Magazine
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“…this sense of belatedness is the real theme of Something Red. Can Jews in the 1970s—and by implication, in our own time—really lay claim to the legacy of Jewish radicalism that dates back to the early 20th century?…As Gilmore shows, political passion comes and goes in historical cycles…"
– Adam Kirsch, Tablet Magazine
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“The novel carefully plumbs all of their psychologies while interweaving them into the backdrop of history…History and the way it exerts an undeniable pressure on a family— shaping, imprisoning, and freeing its members—animates Gilmore’s imagination (Golden Country also follows 20th-century immigrants through generations).”
— Creig Teicher, Publishers Weekly Profile
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The sixth-best sex scene of the year is a hotel-room encounter between a caterer and a vagabond ex-banker in 1980