Name: Bottle Grove
ISBN: 9781632864277

Daniel Handler

A sexy, skewering dark comedy about two unions--one forged of love and the other of greed--and about the forces that can drive couples together, into dependence, and then into sinister, even supernatural realms.al realms.

A Novel

Bottle Grove

avarni

"I want to fuck you," he said against her mouth, "so badly," and that night he did, very badly 

A decision is like a guitar, Padgett thinks. She doesn't know how to make one.

"No one understands you," he says at last, "like I do."

"I don't want to be understood that way." 

it took me a while to finish this one. it's been my least favourite book by daniel handler by far, unfortunately. 

A razor-sharp tale of two couples, two marriages, a bar, and a San Francisco start-up from a best-selling, award-winning novelist. This is a story about two marriages. Or is it? It begins with a wedding, held in the small San Francisco forest of Bottle Grove--bestowed by a wealthy patron for the public good, back when people did such things. Here is a cross section of lives, a stretch of urban green where ritzy guests, lustful teenagers, drunken revelers, and forest creatures all wait for the sun to go down. The girl in the corner slugging vodka from a cough-syrup bottle is Padgett--she's keeping something secreted in the woods. The couple at the altar are the Nickels--the bride is emphatic about changing her name, as there is plenty about her old life she is ready to forget. Set in San Francisco as the tech-boom is exploding, Bottle Grove is a sexy, skewering dark comedy about two unions--one forged of love and the other of greed--and about the forces that can drive couples together, into dependence, and then into sinister, even supernatural realms. Add one ominous shape-shifter to the mix, and you get a delightful and strange spectacle: a story of scheming and yearning and foibles and love and what we end up doing for it--and everyone has a secret. Looming over it all is the income disparity between San Francisco's tech community and . . . everyone else.

Bottle Grove A Novel