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Title: Time's a Thief

Subtitle: A Novel

Author: B. G. Firmani

Narrator: Emily Rankin

Format: Unabridged

Length: 13 hrs and 33 mins

Language: English

Release date: 05-03-17

Publisher: Random House Audio

Ratings: 2.5 of 5 out of 3 votes

Genres: Fiction, Historical

Publisher's Summary:

Eighties New York springs to gritty, vibrant life in this piercingly romantic and compulsively listenable coming-of-age novel. A beautiful, sad, funny, altogether bewitching debut.

Francesca "Chess" Varani is an ultra-bright, sassy, but vulnerable Barnard freshwoman from a blue-collar background in the vibrantly gritty New York City of the mid-'80s. She strikes up a volatile and somewhat toxic friendship with drama-queen classmate Kendra Marr-Löwenstein and falls into the bewitching orbit of her Salingeresque, high-toned family. Upon graduation she moves into the Marr-Löwenstein house in the West Village as a secretary/girl-of-all-work to the soignèe literary intellectual Clarice Marr (think Susan Sontag but blondly coiffed and dressed in Chanel) and receives the sentimental education and emotional roughing up New York bestows on all of its new arrivals - including a love affair with Clarice's glamorously damaged son, Jerry.

The story is related by Chess in sadder but wiser fashion from the distance of a financially beset 2008 and the depths of a crap job taken of necessity, tinged with the poignancy of time and choices made and not made.

Critic Reviews:

"Firmani really captures the grit and promise of 1980s New York, with too many cigarettes and dingy punk shows, when it was both unusual and magical for kids to come...for school.... A leisurely exploration of character and place that, when you connect to Chess, packs a wallop." (Booklist)

Members Reviews:

I loved this book

I loved this book. It's touching, humorous, and very real all at the same time. Having been about the same age as the author during the 80s, and having moved to New York City in 1990 as a young artist, a lot of the descriptions and scenarios ring so true and bring back memories I had forgotten. However I'm sure the time period and context don't exclude other generations of readers from other parts of the world; most of us over 25 can relate to what this self-reflective, quirky, articulate narrator is talking about. Highly recommend.

Easy to read

This was that kind of book that you begin and then just fall into â it was engaging and effortless to read. There have been so many stories set in Manhattan and here we go, another one, but I mean, how many narrators give you two coming-of-age stories?!

At the core were Francesca Variani, Italian Catholic, and the Jewish Kendrick Lowenstein, who met as students at Barnard. Chess (Francesca) is inadvertently engulfed in Kendra's dysfunctional family, but her own family was so dysfunctional that she couldn't be objective. I thought it an interesting note that both girls shared the experience of cold emotionless mothers and useless fathers, one distant, the other cruel.

I loved this book on so many levels. The author's descriptions of New York neighborhoods and subways give the setting genuine depth. When she said that Los Sures had Dominican or Puerto Rican flags hanging which looked like something from a Childe Hassam painting, I knew exactly what she meant.

There's a small roster of characters, some more preplexing than others, but you're not left trying to keep track of who did what.. She nailed Clarice in one paragraph: "Lunch with Clarice was an exercise in what it was to be a WASP.