Tuesday Nights in 1980 (Prentiss)

Book Reviews
Molly Prentiss sets an almost impertinently high bar for herself. She's determined to write a love letter in polychrome to a bygone Manhattan; to recreate the squalid exuberance of Jean-Michel Basquiat's and Keith Haring's art scene; to explore all the important, hairy themes—love, creativity, losing your innocence in one cruel swoop. That she mostly pulls it off is impressive, thrilling.
Jennifer Senior - New York Times Book Review


The gritty New York art scene of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s pulsed with creative energy, and so does this engaging novel… It portrays an intoxicating world and its raw, ungentrified backdrop—both about to be transformed by greed.
People


[Prentiss’s] sensual linguistic flourishes exquisitely evoke the passions we can feel for people and places we’ve known or are discovering…again and again, the temptation is to underline passages…there are riveting plots and subplots… still the book’s magnificence remains in its shadings, descriptive and emotional… toward the end you’ll find yourself turning the pages slowly, sorry to realize you’re almost finished.
Oprah Magazine


It's 1980 in SoHo, and in this thrilling, vibrant debut, a synesthetic art critic could make or break [an artist named] Raul. And so could a girl named Lucy. Oh, and his own recklessness, too.
Marie Claire


Innovative to the max, this debut novel from Molly Prentiss is a book that I've been raving about to everyone I know…. Prentiss will leave you breathless as she plays with form and description in astounding new ways.
Bustle


[Prentiss'] writing is as vivid and sensitive as the pensées of her synesthetic art-critic protagonist...[her] descriptions of the eighties art world ring true on both the texture of the work and its go-go capitalist corruption.
Vulture


Prentiss vividly conjures a colorful love triangle set in the gritty, art-soaked world of downtown New York in 1980.... One yearns for more time spent on the women artists who are minor characters.... Nevertheless, this is a bold and auspicious debut.
Publishers Weekly


We are luckily introduced to three individuals who bravely take the stage, ready to conquer SoHo by storm. Their trek amongst the bright lights is captivating, and readers will be hanging on the edge of their seats.
Romance Times Book Reviews


(Starred review.) A...seductive writer, Prentiss combines exquisite sensitivity with unabashed melodrama to create an operatic tale of ambition and delusion, success and loss, mystery and crassness.... [A] vital, sensuous, edgy, and suspenseful tale of longing, rage, fear, compulsion, and love.
Booklist


(Starred review.) Prentiss' characters...[are] rich, nuanced, satisfyingly complicated.... [T]he novel is elegantly infused with an ambient sense of impending loss...[but] miraculously manages to dodge the trap of easy nostalgia, thanks in large part to Prentiss' wry humor. As affecting as it is absorbing. A thrilling debut.
Kirkus Reviews