You Know Who You Are (Vintage Contemporaries Original) [Paperback]

Ben Dolnick (Author)

Book Description

Release date: March 22, 2011 | Series: Vintage Contemporaries Original

A gorgeous novel of family life, You Know Who You Are is the story of the Vine family, Arthur, Alice, and their three children. The eldest, Will, is well-mannered and academically driven. The youngest, Cara, is a sweet little charmer. Jacob, the middle child, is less sure of who he is. He’s funny, he’s impulsive, and he is often held hostage by his urges to make chaos. But when their mother, Alice, falls ill, Jacob begins to experiment--guiltily, nervously--with the special freedoms conferred on the motherless.
 
Following the Vines as Jacob moves through high school, college, and beyond, You Know Who You Are is a wise, funny, elegiac novel of moving on, pulling together, and answering that most complicated of questions: who will you decide to become?

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Middle child Jacob Vine searches for his place in the world and in his family in Dolnick's wryly comic if unsurprising follow-up to Zoology. Sandwiched between golden child Will and deadly adorable younger sister Cara, Jacob never quite figures out his role, and after his mother dies of cancer when he's in seventh grade, Jacob, ill-equipped to even manage his first real romantic relationship, must add a new dimension to his half-formed identity: motherlessness. He eventually finds a niche studying biology. Of course, Jacob's fictional liberal arts college in the Adirondacks isn't Harvard, Will's alma mater, but Jacob takes to it and agreeably shuffles through the leaving-the-nest gauntlet. Dolnick can admirably distill complex adolescent angst down to precise phrases, and he has an easy hand with Jacob's adolescent romance, though the strained relationship between the brothers (Cara seems like an afterthought) is never particularly revelatory. It's a solid coming-of-age in which Dolnick does his work quietly: sincere and direct, devoid of stylistic flourishes or narrative fireworks. (Mar.)
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From Booklist

Echoing themes from his debut novel, Zoology (2007), Dolnick revisits those moments in life that truly define a person. There is no major conflict or ultimate goal here, only a journey through life and the evolution of one utterly earnest Jacob Vine as he navigates a fragile family dynamic, colorful friends, and a continuously strenuous romantic life. Told over the course of 15 critical years from child to adult, the novel spotlights Jacob in telling vignettes. Sometimes these moments seem small, like how sweaty hand-holding can be for a nervous teenager, but others are clearly consequential, like his mother falling gravely ill. Each milestone carries Jacob a little further along, though, growing a little bit more each time.The years pass by so steadily, always with beautifully constructed settings and fully realistic characters, that by the end, readers will feel a sense of nostalgia, maybe not just over Jacob�s life but also over their own. Dolnick�s quick pace and light style, paired with smart storytelling, will resonate well with the early-twenties crowd. --Casey Bayer

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Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Vintage (March 22, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 030739087X
• ISBN-13: 978-0307390875
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.8 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,121,523 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars a good and painful read April 24, 2011

By fred

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

Dolnick's a dangerous one. i found myself having to look up from the page from time to time to fully savor - or would it be to diminish? - the almost painful flood of recognition, toe-curling embarrassment, lust, etc. that the author is able to put me through with his clean and humble but psychologically acute prose. Dolnick is a serious and moral writer - demonstrating a writerly intelligence and sensitivity without indulging in too many bells and whistles that seek to draw attention to that intelligence or sensitivity. in this way, though his subject is adolescent (for much of the book), his writing is anything but. the narration has been handled so deftly that the writer hasn't left fingerprints on it. for instance, there's the grace with which dolnick moves between time slices of jacob's life. this is the kind of writerly virtuosity that only reveals itself when you notice, at some point, what you're not noticing all that much - i.e., the passage of time in the narrative. the fact that you're somehow inhabiting years of jacob's inner life, and shouldering the subtle heft of them as they accumulate, and yet, this is all happening in less than 300 hundred pages.

i highly recommend this book, especially to anyone who ever went to high school, ever.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Loved it. April 1, 2011

By Anne Golden

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

This is a terrific book. It's a breathtakingly honest account of Jacob Vine as he goes from adolescence to young adulthood. At times funny, it is most especially poignant. Not so much a coming of age novel, as a coming into one's own story.

4.0 out of 5 stars A novel of relation. March 21, 2013

By Amy Gibler Brown

Format:Paperback

When I read "You Know Who You Are" I felt myself identifying and empathizing with many moments, or recalling stories of the moments I hadn't experienced first hand. Dolnick presents his audience with an honest, real, and highly tangible range of emotions and situations. His writing is as familiar as a conversation in your family room, and the book moves quickly. I read it all in one airplane trip, and it was an absolute delight.