Really a 4.5 — really interesting portrait of 60s-80s New York, highlighting how social mores have changed in that time. Very engaging, very readable, and I really liked the structure. My main complaint about this is that the main characters is mostly uninteresting, with little spirit or drive. The people around her are the real stars. Interstingly (maybe) I was watching Yellowjackets at the same time as reading this, and with its similar teen / adult split narrative I couldn't help but picture the main character, Georgette, as Shauna from Yellowjackets. It covers a lot of ground, but the main story theme is the struggle of someone from a privileged background struggling to fight for social justice, rejecting her privilege — I felt this was conveyed and explored very effectively. The almost monomaniacal focus, and destructiveness that entails, reminded me of The Moon & Sixpence.

(Also have no recollection of how I came to be reading this book — recommendation? mentioned in an article?) ( )

Ann Drayton and Georgette George are roommates at Barnard in the 1960's. Ann comes from wealth and privilege and Georgette is the first in her dysfunctional family to go to college. Ann had requested someone "very different than herself". Ann feels deep guilt about being white and privileged and shows great distain for anyone of her class including her own parents.

Georgette, on the other hand, is attempting to strive to get that kind of lifestyle. They become deep friends revealing much of themselves to each other. Meanwhile Georgette's younger sister Solange has disappeared from home finding herself in a drug world of groupies and others in the rock scene.

Georgette and Ann leave on unpleasant terms but years later, Georgette reads in the newspaper that Ann has killed a policeman.

The book alternates between telling the stories of these three young women in the late 60's and 70's. Ann holds fast to her firmly held beliefs that white people are responsible for much of what is wrong in the world. She has a relationship with a black man who after being stopped by the police, causes Ann to shoot the policeman.

This is a totally believable story filled with much background of the 60's and 70's. Neither character is particularly likeable, especially Ann's distain for her parents. Even in prison, Ann finds a way to always associate with the least liked and helpless people.

There were parts of this book that I thought were very well written and held my interest; other parts especially about the experiences on drugs I sort of scanned. However, the ending was strong and Ann truly does appear to be one of the "last of her kind." ( )

One I couldn't put down - great story but I couldn't get my head around that this was written by Nunez, reminded me a lot of American Pastoral by Joyce Carol Oates. ( )

I was reading an old review of The Last of Her Kind by Sigrid Nunez—published back in 2006—and it got me to thinking of the many discussions I had with my late wife Vicky about all the hopes and changes of the 1960s and early 70s. Combining that reviewer’s words and my memories, this moth of a man was powerfully drawn to that light, this book.

It’s the story of two young women from very different backgrounds who met in college in 1968, and were linked their entire lives, except for the long stretch when they never talked because of a serious disagreement. Ann Drayton was Georgette George’s roommate at Barnard, and learned that Ann had requested a roommate from a different social background, something George didn’t even know was a choice.

Ann is extremely idealistic and romanticizes the underprivileged, while coming from a very privileged and moneyed New England background. George comes from a sad upstate New York town and is striving to escape the financial woes of her background. George is profoundly confused by her new roommate’s romanticized view of people struggling for money. They become friends and talk long into the night in their college room, about everything.

The book is immersed in the hope, politics, clothes, music, and the adventures of the times. The refrain of “a better world coming,” plays out differently and tragically for Ann. She becomes a political radical, and the novel moves her through many wild times. She finds herself in a horrible situation where she’s forced to shoot two cops who looked like they were about to kill her black lover on the street below. The story of the shooting plays forward and back, and finally with all the flashbacks and additional facts, we see how it all went down. During her trial she speaks of the cops calling her lover nigger over and over, until she shot them. Later, she says that maybe she wouldn’t have done it if the cops hadn’t said nigger that one last time. She used the gun out of a love for her man and against the ominous threat playing out on the street—between a black man and the possibly murderous police.

Considering the current police violence and the resulting Black Lives Matter marches, this was a fascinating time to have picked up this book. Originally, I chose the book because of my memories of the social and racial conflicts of the past, but seeing the same things happening all over again, makes it clear that our country desperately needs more protest and change.

Through much of the book our unremorseful cop killer—she did it for love— is in the prison system, where she does much to help the underprivileged there. It made me think of the universe acting as an employer, placing a “social worker” exactly where she could do the most good for people.

The writing is outstanding and moves smoothly through the different times, and the different eras of these two women’s lives. By not telling the story chronologically, as the book never reveals everything at once, the facts show up at different times, and the reader is left to piece the different stories together. I found that aspect of the writing very satisfying.

As to the “hope of the time,” while it was so strong, the time that followed wasn’t a simple story. Reality has a way of complicating everything, as very little moves from point A to point B clearly and logically. The book has a sharp eye for playing these stories out in a most intriguing way.

Allow me to quote from a review of the book in The Baltimore Sun that said the following. “Decades from now, historians would do well to consult this book to get a true sense of how the upheavals of the late 1960s reverberated through the lives of young Americans from one who experienced the social earthquake firsthand.”

Let me jump to our current times for a paragraph. My head and heart are currently so overwhelmed by how our society is presently playing itself out. I think most Americans would like to take a four-year step back in time, to a better and more humane time, and then see about taking some more positive steps forward. We need to catch our breath and collect ourselves. Wild to think of this country with an unprecedented black president would turn out to be more “normal” than the hideous Cheetos president that followed. Someday we’ll move forward again

I truly loved the heart of this book. There was a strong core of love, political idealism, hope, shame, racism, and it all played out to the music of the times, and it all rang true because of some very impressive writing. Though I have little space for it, this book will definitely stay on my bookshelf, until I read it again. ( )

Georgette George is a woman who had a bad childhood, but escapes to NYC and Barnard in the late sixties. For the rest of her life, she will be fascinated by her college roommate, Ann - a child of privilege, intent on making up for it in guilt and activism. This one almost reads like a memoir, and a dour one too. I almost abandoned it, but ended up plowing through it. There is an interesting shift of narrator at the end, but the voice doesn't change enough to make it entirely convincing. ( )