Coming off of reading His Dark Materials, I was a little angry when I started reading this book. I didn’t want to read about REAL people, I wanted to stay in my fantasy world of moral black and white. I found it so jarring to switch from a story with characters so lovable and blameless to a realistic fiction piece about obviously flawed people operating in moral gray areas. So I began reading The Emperor’s Children in the lobby of a Hyundai dealership (I happened to be getting an oil change that day) with a really pessimistic attitude.

This novel is mainly about three friends in their early thirties (and one chunky, awkward college-age boy) and their attempts to do something meaningful with their lives, mostly in terms of romance or career. They all live in New York. They all think all of the others have “issues”. None of these characters is particularly likable. Marina, who promises she’ll one day finish her book about how children’s clothes reflect social issues, is the daughter of a celebrated journalist. Danielle is a documentary film producer who seems to be sensible about everything except love. Julius is a freelance reviewer who is desperately trying to throw off his rural Michigan roots and live a more extravagant lifestyle than his writing can really pay for. Marina’s unfortunately-named younger cousin, Frederick “Bootie” Tubb, fancies himself an intellectual beyond his years and moves to New York hoping to find a like-minded mentor in his successful uncle. These four find that their best-laid plans don’t tend to work out quite like they’d hoped. This novel is also loosely about 9/11, which blindsides everyone near the end of the book (spoiler? Though in a book about early-00s NYC, what else is it going to be about?), making all their struggles and wishes seem petty and irrelevant. Yeah, this book seemed like it was going to be a bit of a downer.

During the first chapter, which follows Danielle as she muddles through a dinner party while inwardly scoffing at all the other attendees, I decided that I wasn’t in the mood for this kind of book. The judgmental attitude, cynical inner voice and forced interest that Danielle presented at the beginning of the book — well, it perhaps hit a little too close to home for my liking. But realizing that was probably the reason I kept on reading.

It didn’t help my optimism when I discovered that the sentence structure was often extremely convoluted. All the commas and nested statements, sometimes going for half a page before encountering a single period, was really unnerving at first. You give me characters with false facades and scathing inner monologue thinly concealing their own self-loathing AND ridiculously longwinded run-on sentences on top of that? If I hadn’t been stuck at the dealership for an hour and a half, I would have given up in the first chapter. But I was surprised at how quickly I got used to the writing style. I by the third chapter in, I didn’t even blink at a half-page sentence.

Despite my initial cynicism, though, The Emperor’s Children managed to change my mind. I began to feel for the characters and their struggles, even if I didn’t agree with their decisions (and there were a lot of parts during which I shouted at the page something akin to “WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT?” — in my head, of course, I don’t typically emote to the level of screaming at inanimate objects). It’s a credit to the author that she could make me sympathize with each and every character in the book, even Marina, who I found particularly irritating. I saw a bit of myself in Bootie whose ridiculous self-righteousness was only apparent to himself in retrospect, and in Julius who couldn’t seem to reconcile his desire for a committed relationship with his distaste for stagnancy. There’s this expectation that a person should have their life figured out by thirty, and admitting that you don’t — that you’re faking it just as much as you were in high school — is tough to do. I could sympathize with that, even if I didn’t exactly agree with the characters’ ways of dealing with that difficulty. By the end they all seem to reach, if not a resolution, then an uneasy peace with their respective situations. In the face of a terrorist attack, certain pills just seem easier to swallow. Pretty much everyone’s arc ends with a spark of hope in the face of personal tragedy.

Will I ever re-read this book? Probably not. It was a little too depressing, and I’m a sucker for a happy ending. I think it’s an insightful look into quarter-life crisis — which appears to be becoming more of a thing for millenials who are spending more years living at home and maybe not having such a good time coping with that. The Emperor’s Children shows that maybe some of us adults are not as well-adjusted as people think we are (or as we’d like others to think we are). That can be a tough truth to come to terms with, which is maybe why this wasn’t the most fun read for me. But it also shows that it’s never too late to turn things around.