Community Board: A Novel (B&N Exclusive Edition)

by Tara Conklin

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

From the author of The Last Romantics, Community Board is a warm, big-hearted novel about starting over, the nature of change and how to exist within a community in the internet age.

This Barnes & Noble Exclusive Edition includes a letter just for B&N readers plus additional community board postings, sure to please fans both old and new.

The New York Times bestselling author of The Last Romantics delivers a wise, timely, big-hearted novel of unplanned isolation and newly forged community.

Where does one go, you might ask, when the world falls apart? When the immutable facts of your life—the mundane, the trivial, the take-for-granted minutiae that once filled every second of every day—suddenly disappear? Where does one go in such dire and unexpected circumstances?

I went home, of course.

 MURBRIDGE COMMUNITY MESSAGE BOARD

FREE: 500 cans of corn. Accidentally ordered them online. I really hate corn. Happy to help load.

REMINDER: use your own goddamn garbage can for your own goddamn pet waste. I’m looking at you Peter Luflin.

REMINDER: monthly Select Board meeting this Friday. Agenda items: 1) sludge removal; 2) upkeep of chime tower; 3) ice rink monitor thank you gift. Questions? Contact Hildegard Hyman, [e-mail]

Darcy Clipper, prodigal daughter, nearly thirty, has returned home to Murbridge, Massachusetts, after her life takes an unwelcome left turn. Murbridge, Darcy is convinced, will welcome her home and provide a safe space in which she can nurse her wounds and harbor grudges, both real and imagined.

But Murbridge, like so much else Darcy thought to be fixed and immutable, has changed. And while Darcy’s first instinct might be to hole herself up in her childhood bedroom, subsisting on Chef Boy-R-Dee and canned chickpeas, it is human nature to do two things: seek out meaningful human connection and respond to anonymous internet postings. As Murbridge begins to take shape around Darcy, both online and in person, Darcy will consider the most fundamental of American questions: What can she ask of her community? And what does she owe it in return?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780063312463
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	03/28/2023
Edition description:	B&N Exclusive Edition
Pages:	272
Sales rank:	33,181
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Tara Conklin was born on St. Croix in the US Virgin Islands and raised in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. She is the author of the New York Times bestsellers The Last Romantics and The House Girl.  

Editorial Reviews

01/02/2023

Conklin’s quirky but undercooked latest (after The Last Romantics) follows the travails of a brokenhearted woman as she returns to her Massachusetts hometown. Darcy Clipper, 29, works as a junior actuary and lives with her husband, Skip, in Boston. When Skip announces he’s leaving her, she retreats to Murbridge, hoping for a warm embrace from her parents. To her surprise, they’ve just relocated to Arizona, where they’re “trying out” a retirement community. Hunkered down in her parents’ house, she insists they come back, but after weeks of solitude, she reluctantly starts looking for work. Through some odd jobs, Darcy makes new friends like Marcus Dash-LaGrand; his husband, Dan; and their three kids. Newcomers to town, Marcus and Dan hope to build a playground and open their backyard to the children in the community, a plan that homophobe local Jake—who has his eyes on their property—tries to thwart. Coincidences and surprise revelations involving Jake’s scheming lead to a showdown at a town meeting, where the playground’s fate is decided. The plot is paper-thin and the tone too cutesy, but Conklin ably conveys Darcy’s state of arrested development, as well as her transition into a stronger person who strives to help her friends despite her anxieties. This is far from life-changing, but there’s fun to be had. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

A brilliant, hilarious look at modern-day community and the distance between who we are and who we say we are. Insightful, honest, and surprisingly sly. I loved this book.”

New York Times bestselling author Maria Semple

A brilliant, hilarious look at modern-day community and the distance between who we are and who we say we are. Insightful, honest, and surprisingly sly. I loved this book.” — Maria Semple

“Tara Conklin is a generous writer who deftly brings us into the world of this fictional family, an engrossing and vivid place where I was happy to stay. The Last Romantics is a richly observed novel, both ambitious and welcoming.” — Meg Wolitzer on The Last Romantics

“It is the strength and fragility of the siblings’ bond, the evolving nature of love that is at the core of Conklin’s novel....Gracefully rendered, The Last Romantics focuses on the familiar theme of family with great originality.” — Washington Post on The Last Romantics

“Conklin examines her characters’ lives with generosity and an unflinching eye for the complexities of love and family.... Fans of Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections will find similar pleasures in the intelligence and empathy on display here.” — USA Today (four stars) on The Last Romantics

“A modern epic...in the vein of Commonwealth, The Last Romantics is a sweeping look at what binds families together.” — Glamour

“Conklin is an accomplished storyteller.... In its elegiac final chapter, The Last Romantics leaves its characters—and its dazzled readers—surrounded by a halo of love.” — Seattle Times

“Pick up The Last Romantics when you want to be swept into a fictional family....As the narrative traces [the Skinner siblings’] converging and diverging paths over the course of their lives—and promises made, kept, broken, changed—you’ll fall deeper and deeper in.” — Goop on The Last Romantics

From the Publisher