Juliet, Naked

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Juliet, Naked

Juliet, Naked - Hardcover - UK - Viking Press - 2009 - 1st Edition.jpg

Hardcover - UK - 1st edition.

Author Nick Hornby
Published 2009-09-29
Type Fiction
Genre Comedy, Drama
Themes Comedy, Drama, Music, Romance
Age Group Adult

Juliet, Naked is a novel by Nick Hornby published on 2009-09-29. It was made into a film with the same title in 2018.

The story is set in present day Britain and revolves around a woman named Annie, the long-suffering girlfriend to a self-absorbed man-child named Duncan. Duncan is obsessed with the American rock musician Tucker Crowe, who, twenty years ago in the middle of a world tour to promote his latest highly successful album, abruptly quit music and disappeared.

Personal

Own?Hardcover, USA, first edition.
Read?Hardcover, USA, first edition.
Finished2024-09-24.

I've enjoyed every book of Hornby's that I've read, so I was confident I would enjoy this one too.

Review

Overall:

Rating-8.svg

Good

  • Overall, I found the book enjoyable from start to finish. I found the three main characters to be complex enough to be believable and interesting, and enjoyed how they interacted with each other. I was rooting for all of them in spite of their flaws.
  • There were several clever and laugh out loud moments.

Bad

Ugly

  • Nothing.

Media

Covers

Representation

Strong female character?PassAnnie sets goals for herself achieves them, and grows significantly.
Bechdel test?FailAnnie briefly chats with Ros, but the talk is about men.
Strong person of color character?FailPretty much every character is white.
Queer character?PassRos is a lesbian, and Gina's ex is mentioned to have most likely been gay.

Quotes

— This section contains spoilers! —

  • But she envied her, too. Who wouldn't want to make a man that passionate, that unhappy, that inspired? If you couldn't write songs yourself, then surely what Julie had done was the next best thing?
  • It felt like one of those moments in a relationship—and there were enough of them in theirs, God knows—that would look completely innocuous to an outsider, but which were packed with meaning and aggression.
  • "Do you need someone to talk to?" "Oh. Thank you. No, no, I'm fine." He touched his face—he'd been crying harder than he'd realized. "You sure? You don't look fine." "No, really. I've just... I've just had a very intense emotional experience." He held out one of his iPod headphones, as if that would explain it. "On here." "You're crying about music?" The woman looked at him as if he were some kind of pervert.
  • He had been an inadequate father to Lizzie and Jesse and Cooper, but his inadequacies seemed forgivable, somehow; he could forgive them, anyway, even if the children and mothers concerned were less indulgent.
  • Tucker had misspent his youth on deathly pale English models with cheekbones instead of breasts, and he was now paying the price. Now that he thought about it, he had paid the price then, too.
  • He was almost certainly gay, and hated Gina for failing to cure him of his attraction to other men.
  • Malcolm went quiet. Annie knew that this was a technique analysts were supposed to use: if they waited long enough, then the person undergoing analysis would eventually shout out "I slept with my father!" and everyone could go home.
  • This was his life, right here, and however many things he put into a bag, he couldn't take it with him. Even if he could take everything he owned, he'd still be leaving it behind.
  • "Wondering whether you'll ever have sex again?" "Not yet." "You should."
  • Actually, it wasn't Duncan's appearance that was the problem. It was harder to believe that a woman would spend an evening talking to Duncan and still want to sleep with him.
  • "I don't mind a bit of the Boss sometimes. That 'Born in the U.S.A.' is all right when you've had a few and you're driving home."
  • In his line of work, it didn't take much to gain a reputation as a decent human being. As long as you didn't hurl a girl out of a window when you'd finished with her, people thought you were Gandhi.
  • They were definitely checking each other out now. He could tell that Natalie had absorbed Carrie completely and then somehow spat her out again, and that Carrie knew she'd been spat out. Tucker accepted completely that women were the fairer and wiser sex, but they were also irredeemably vicious when the occasion demanded.
  • "This is what constitutes foreplay, when you get older—a woman who's prepared to look your medical condition up before she sleeps with you."

Adaptions

The book has been made into a film.

Links

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