The Middlesteins - Tapa blanda

The Middlesteins had me from its very first pages (Jonathan Franzen)

Family ties are anything but simple, and the joy of this book lies in Attenberg's merciless, tender, often brilliantly funny peeling back of the layers of history. Sublime. (Kate Saunders Daily Mail)

Flows like double cream ... Like the best culinary confections, Attenberg's prose is complex, bitter as well as tender (Sunday Telegraph)

Blazing, ferocious and greathearted ... The Middlesteins will blow you away (Lauren Groff)

Attenberg makes her characters' thoughts - Richard and Benny in particular - seem utterly real, and her wry, observational humor often hits sideways rather than head-on ... [A] wonderfully messy and layered family portrait (Kirkus)

The Middlesteins, the novel, is great literature: warm, tragic, funny and deeply, complexly, entirely human. (Stefan Merrill Block)

This gem of a book is swift, moving and brutally honest, but it has a family-centric moral at its heart: Without family, we are nothing. (New York Post)

Attenberg is superb at mocking the cliches of middle-class life by giving them the slightest turn to make people suddenly real and wholly sympathetic. (Washington Post)

Attenberg evokes memorable moments of authentic sadness and tenderness while thoughtfully and comically examining the question of what we inherit from our families. In the case of the Middlesteins, it is many things, including their sometimes-enduring love for each other. (San Fransisco Chronicle)

Edie pulses with life no matter how close she seems to dying, and her character is emblematic of the tough compassion Attenberg exhibits throughout the novel. (Chicago Tribue)