This is a stunning, dark novel about poverty and womanhood. As a working class woman, so much of this felt like diving into my culture and history, and mourning for the mothers before me. Tragic and so accurate.

This book wasn't for me. I found it very much like 'I did this and then I did that and then this happened.' It's very much about not fitting it with those around you.
Thank you Netgalley for providing a copy.

A perfect title for what seemed a cold little book for me. An unusual writing style that added to the sparseness of the life for poor Ruth.
It’s the sort of book you remember odd lines from but not particularly one I would ever chose to read again.

I’ve read Manguso’s four nonfiction works and especially love her Wellcome Book Prize-shortlisted medical memoir The Two Kinds of Decay. The aphoristic style she developed in her two previous books continues here as discrete paragraphs and brief vignettes build to a gloomy portrait of Ruthie’s archetypical affection-starved childhood in the fictional Massachusetts town of Waitsfield in the 1980s and 90s. She’s an only child whose parents no doubt were doing their best after emotionally stunted upbringings but never managed to make her feel unconditionally loved. Praise is always qualified and stingily administered. Ruthie feels like a burden and escapes into her imaginings of how local Brahmins – Cabots and Emersons and Lowells – lived. Her family is cash-poor compared to their neighbours and loves nothing more than a trip to the dump: “My parents weren’t after shiny things or even beautiful things; they simply liked getting things that stupid people threw away.”

The depiction of Ruthie’s narcissistic mother is especially acute. She has to make everything about her; any minor success of her daughter’s is a blow to her own ego. I marked out an excruciating passage that made me feel so sorry for this character. A European friend of the family visits and Ruthie’s mother serves corn muffins that he seems to appreciate.
My mother brought up her triumph for years. … She’d believed his praise was genuine. She hadn’t noticed that he’d pegged her as a person who would snatch up any compliment into the maw of her unloved, throbbing little heart.

At school, as in her home life, Ruthie dissociates herself from every potentially traumatic situation. “My life felt unreal and I felt half-invested. I felt indistinct, like someone else’s dream.” Her friend circle is an abbreviated A–Z of girlhood: Amber, Bee, Charlie and Colleen. “Odd” men – meaning sexual predators – seem to be everywhere and these adolescent girls are horribly vulnerable. Molestation is such an open secret in the world of the novel that Ruthie assumes this is why her mother is the way she is.

While the #MeToo theme didn’t resonate with me personally, so much else did. Chemistry class, sleepovers, getting one’s first period, falling off a bike: this is the stuff of girlhood – if not universally, then certainly for the (largely pre-tech) American 1990s as I experienced them. I found myself inhabiting memories I hadn’t revisited for years, and a thought came that had perhaps never occurred to me before: for our time and area, my family was poor, too. I’m grateful for my ignorance: what scarred Ruthie passed me by; I was a purely happy child. But I think my sister, born seven years earlier, suffered more, in ways that she’d recognize here. This has something of the flavour of Eileen and My Name Is Lucy Barton and reads like autofiction even though it’s not presented as such. The style and contents may well be divisive. I’ll be curious to hear if other readers see themselves in its sketches of childhood.

What a raw, honest novel! Ruthie reflects on her early life and dysfunctional family in small town New England. This is a vivid portrayal of growing up poor, not fitting in, set against a background of cruelty, shame and neglect. Everything is cold, inside and out and an underlying menace pervades. But this is not a graphic pity party of a book. It’s a coming of age, surviving and getting out of there tale. The subject matter is shattering but the prose is stark, stunning and beautiful. I loved it. Many thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for the ARC. All views are my own.

In 'Very Cold People', the narrator Ruthie looks back on her upbringing in the small town of Waitsfield, Massachusetts, whose coldness mirrors the lack of affection and love she receives as a child. Ruthie recounts her childhood in a series fragmented memories which have a quietly devastating cumulative effect. Manguso writes with a sense of detachment which initially feels offputting but is rather effective in reflecting how a child would experience this frozen world.

Perhaps the best-drawn character in the novel is Ruthie's insecure and narcissistic mother; at one point after she has returned from a school reunion, Ruthie observes that her mother "thought that everyone had come to the reunion to watch her attend the reunion"; later on she explains how her mother "was practising, to see what it would be like to hurt me, a lot, to show how much she loved me. She had to be careful. If anyone found out that she loved me, we'd both be in trouble."

Much of the shame Ruthie feels comes from her class-consciousness and her sense of being an outsider within her town: even when her family's financial situation has improved, they "didn't know yet how not to be poor", and there is a constant streak of meanness and parsimony running through her childhood: her parents "couldn't conceive of buying a gift' a gift was something you gave away when you didn't want it any more." Manguso also writes perceptively about the casual cruelty of schoolchildren as Ruthie recalls her shifting friendships, as well as the indifference of many adults.

The novel is quite short and although I enjoyed Manguso's crystalline prose, I spent much of the novel wondering how it cohered. Gradually, however, a clear undercurrent emerges across Ruthie's descriptions of her family, school and community, a pattern of behaviour which leaves a legacy that is all the more terrible for being unspoken; at the same time, the novel becomes more of a quest narrative as we see Ruthie's determination to escape from this cycle of abuse and shame.

Overall, I found this a chilling and beautifully written novel. Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for sending me an ARC to review.

A short sharp shock of a novel, beautifully written and entirely thought provoking.

I'm not sure I can say I enjoyed it exactly, it had an effective darkness about it, but I was engrossed throughout the telling of Ruth's story, her coming of age in a chilly, distant town.

It is a novel of perception and coming of age, over quickly but remaining in the heart and mind for a long time after turning the final page.

Vignettes of the narrator's life growing up in a small American town with emotionally distant, casually cruel parents.

The observations, humour and horror are told in a deadpan voice.

With thanks to NetGalley and Pan Macmillan for the ARC.

Thank you to NetGalley and Pan Macmillan for granting me an advanced copy of this book!

'I like to visit with the exhausted girl who once was me'

Very rarely do books make you realise how universal certain elements of growing up as a girl in a small town are but Manguso has managed to do just that in Very Cold People. This book was truly stunning, it is written in such a gorgeously heartbreaking way that it was both hard to read and stop reading at times. Very Cold People is a coming of age story that follows Ruthie as she recounts her 1980s childhood and growing into her teens when she discovers more about her family's own personal lives and why they are the way that they are.

While this is, unfortunately, the kind of book that won't be for everyone, those who it is for will enjoy it and relate to it. Personally, I found this book immensely interesting and the wringing style made stand out so much against similar books, it has made me want to recommend the book to others I know as well as read more of Sarah Manguso's work.

If you didn't know that Sarah Manguso is a poet, you would come to suspect it within a few lines of Very Cold People's exquisite prose. Through short vignettes Manguso introduces use to Ruth, the young daughter of Italian and Jewish parents. Ruth's family lives is Waitsfield, Massachusetts, a town with a strong WASP character, where her heritage and relative poverty make her a constant outsider.

Ruth is an anxious child, sensing her "otherness", brought in by her heritage, her status and her dysfunctional family. Her parents are explosions of noise when they appear, full of bile and bitterness. They are fully embodied, dismissive of privacy, excitable in their cruelty.

Ruthie is both straightforward and lyrical, particularly poetic when describing feelings and emotions. Her recollections can be blunt and shocking as well as piercingly beautiful. Manguso balances her language with precision, using brute physicality, smells, fluids and bodily effluvia just as effectively as a delicate metaphor.

There's a strong theme of sexual abuse from many of the adults in Ruth's life, both as perpetrators and victims. It casts a pall over the work, ever-present but never fully acknowledged or interrogated, because for Ruth, this is a common-place of life. The author knows exactly when silence is her most effective tool and uses a piecemeal narrative structure to brilliant effect, where a continuous narrative might blunt the edge of her words.

Very Cold People is a beautiful but painful coming-of-she story. Skillfully rendered and wonderfully evocative of the cold New England landscape, the piled snow as well as the characters who populate it.

Brilliant, startling- for fans of Jenny Offilli. Elegant and sparse and packs a real punch. Okay that should do it, just building up the character limit- warmest wishes, Jenny.

This coming of ages story was a very emotive read and contains lots of hardhitting issues such as bullying, abuse, wuestionable, at best, parenting and so forth. I was gripped and compelled to read further as I wanted to see what happened throughout the book. It was well written with well developed if yet detestable charcaters at times and an interesting yet brutal storyline.
This book wont be for everyone but I found it enjoyable.

I'd seen this on many "anticipated books of 2022" lists and had previously thought Manguso's Ongoingness: The End of a Diary sounded intriguing so decided to give her debut novel a try.

I'll be honest - this left very little impression on me on finishing beyond a feeling of boredom. A coming of age story in small town America, it's pretty much all doom and gloom from the get-go: bullying classmates, abused friends, questionable parenting (the protagonists mother and father seemed particularly befitting of the label of "cold people" contained in the title) -- rinse and repeat. The writing was competent, but that was not enough to save the novel for this reader.

Set in a small New England town, buttoned up and demarcated between rich and poor, Very Cold People sees a woman explore her childhood, brought up by two people desperately ill equipped for the job. Her mother is a housewife whose full-time occupation is making ends meet. They live frugally to say the least. Her parents frequently row, both in a perpetual state of irritation turning to anger at the slightest opportunity. Affection is rare, and when it happens isn’t repeated no matter how much Ruth begs for it. As the years wear one, Ruth begins to understand why her mother is the way she is and seeks a way out for herself.

Sarah Manguso’s powerful novella is written from Ruth’s perspective in cool, crisp, clean prose from which vivid descriptions occasionally shine out together with glimmers of deadpan humour. It was the quality of that writing that made me stick with this bleak story, and it does end with hope. A striking piece of fiction, fearless in its approach to a theme which can sometimes be clumsily handled.

Very Cold People by Sarah Manguso is a coming of age story that relates Ruth's experiences growing up in her flawed family and at school amongst her damaged classmates. Brutal and compelling.

Very Cold People is a novel about growing up in a small town in New England, and understanding what goes on without being discussed. Ruth lives with her parents in a town where name means everything, feeling barely noticed, but watching everything going on. As she grows up, she starts to see under the surface, of the town, her parents, and her friends, and things aren't as simple as she thought when she was younger.

Written from Ruth's point of view with each chapter feeling like an episode she's narrating, looking back and sharing her descriptions and thoughts, the book has a distinctive style, feeling somewhat removed in a way that matches the title, with Ruth not quite connecting with the 'very cold people'. There's not so much of a plot as a slow unfurling of Ruth growing up and describing what she now knows about the town and people, but the book is quite short so it doesn't drag on. Stylistically, it's clever, but I found myself expecting something that didn't quite come, so I found the ending just kind of happened without feeling like it was over. The whole town and the ways people behave are depicted well, but I think it wasn't up my street.

Combining a coming of age type story through the narrative voice with a look at the darker edges of small town life, Very Cold People uses style and tone carefully to build up a picture of what's going on. If you like books made of small moments and changes, that look to the past and notice town dynamics, then it might be for you, though I found it drifted past me at times and I'm perhaps not interested enough in small town American life.

Sarah Manguso’s primarily known for her creative non-fiction but turned to the novel as a container for, what’s she’s labelled, telling the story of where she came from. Her narrative unfolds from the perspective of Ruth who’s looking back at her formative years in Waitsfield, where her Italian Jewish family were forever trying, and failing, to fit. Waitsfield’s a fictional place, a composite of the small colonial towns around Boston. Places that pride themselves on their heritage, where surnames, addresses and house size are markers of worth and placement in the social hierarchy. Initially this read like a throwback to an earlier era of literary expression, with echoes of the kind of coming-of-age story that used to be associated with magazines like the New Yorker. It’s a pared-down piece, there’s little dialogue, and not much in the way of plot. The action’s fragmented, presented in a series of short paragraphs, like encountering a scattering of snapshots, moments that rise to the fore of Ruth’s thoughts.

Manguso’s territory seemed familiar, overly familiar even, a struggling family, hand-me-down clothes, small-scale school and local dramas, friendships gained and lost, a young girl restless, eager to get out and see the world. But there’s something increasingly unsettling about Ruth’s story, a creeping sourness, a sinister undercurrent, a keen sense of the grotesque, all the more so for being represented in such a deadpan style. And it becomes clear that what links Ruth’s episodic recollections’s trauma but often just glimpsed, seen out of the corner of the eye, barely-acknowledged. Abuse is rife in this place, incest, sexual exploitation, emotional, physical, any and all kinds, handed down through generations and played out through the bodies of Waitsfield’s girls. Manguso’s novel’s cleverly constructed, meticulously observed, with everything coming together to form a haunting account of damage, patriarchy and power.

Thanks to Netgalley and publisher Picador for an arc