"Gina Frangello is an author who pushes boundaries. This novel is no exception. Every Kind of Wanting is a book about the family we choose versus the family we wish we could have, but it’s also about desire and love and our basest needs.... [T]he story fascinates and never falters. Frangello takes on an enthralling range of issues, from sexuality to assimilation, and keeping secrets is her greatest talent. Every page brings a new revelation, making the bitter end even sweeter."
"[A] charming novel... She has subverted the old-fashioned suburban narrative, and filled it with a constellation of quirky characters... Frangello threads conflicts over ethnicity, class, and sexuality into the novel, and injects a smart topicality that gives it special resonance."
"Do you watch Love Actually every Christmas for the intertwining storylines, tragicomic characters, and themes of love and family? Frangello's new novel has all of that, minus the Hollywood sentimentality… Every Kind of Wanting is grand in scope but intimate in detail."
"Frangello's story is also an act of weaving, the warp and weft of lives turned toward the arrival of an infant... It's the balance between interior and exterior, tidiness and chaos, that makes Every Kind of Wanting so winsome. The reader sees the imperfections of these collective lives like a great tableau, as rich and human as a hand-hewn tapestry."
"Though the plot is twisted, the characters are the heart of the story. Each chapter moves the story along through a different character’s point of view. Lina’s chapters are a suspenseful mixture of second- and first-person, always hinting at knowing more than she’s letting on. Every Kind of Wanting deals with the kind of trauma that cracks you open over time. At the heart of such memories are where identities are found and bonds are formed. And with Chicago as the setting, a cultural landscape takes shape, bringing up even more issues of assimilation and wealth and sexuality and religion. All the details culminate into a climax that is simultaneously heartbreaking and inevitable. Frangello, who lives in Chicago herself, is a sculptor who has carved out the truest and most intimate parts of a human life."
"Frangello’s characters are flawed but sympathetic, and she brings up important points about race, class and sexuality. Read this if you’ve ever wondered how you’d fare in such a situation—or if you’re just deeply curious about how such nontraditional pregnancies might play out in the real world."
"While all families are strange, I guarantee you haven't met one like this...Every Kind of Wanting is a powderkeg disguised as a domestic drama that detonates every one of out expectations of what it means to be a family."
"Gina Frangello is a miracle worker. She keeps introducing me to characters who I initially have every intention of hating, but then, miraculously, come to love. In this gorgeous, complex, funny, sexy, and thoroughly modern story, she unpacks the origins of selfishness with unparalleled honesty and compassion. I couldn't put this down."
"Each unhappy family is unhappy in it’s own way, but the families in Frangello’s latest novel are truly in a category all their own. Every Kind of Wanting maps the intersection of four Chicago couples as they fall into an impressively ambitious fertility scheme in the hopes of raising a “community baby.” But first there are family secrets to reveal, abusive pasts to decipher, and dangerous decisions to make. If it sounds complicated, well, it is, but behind all the potential melodrama is a story that takes a serious look at race, class, sexuality, and loyalty — in short, at the new American family."
"A Life in Men is a terrific book, a tender story of friendship, and a frank story of a young woman's adventures with an assortment of oddly funny, violent, and quirky men. It's intense and beautifully written."
"An EPIC TOUR DE FORCE capturing a woman's entire life amid a world torn apart by terrorism and alienation, and ultimately ... an exploration of what individual fulfillment means in such a world, and how grief, identity, sexuality, and responsibility intersect."
"Gina Frangello's luminous novel is deeply human, darkly funny, seriously sexy; it brims with artistry and intelligence and heart... Frangello illuminates the ways in which life itself is an illusion, but a grand and beautiful and HEARTBREAKING AND BRILLIANT one."
"Original and fearless . . . A powerful portrait of human connection and individual triumph."
"Powerful..ambitious...relentless…a work of art."
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The Slut Lullabies
"Gino Frangello's Slut Lullabies will seduce you."
"Slut Lullabies is beautiful, daring, triumphant. Gina‘ s writing is fearless and original and kind and there simply aren‘t enough books like this."
"Savvy, sexy, blunt stories that keeping inviting a reader in. Frangello‘ s voice feels like a friend you‘ve known for years, telling you stories with warmth and insight."
"Gina Frangello is unafraid to look hard at the dark side of human nature, but she writes with such compassion and humor that we came away from these fictions with new insight into the strange world we all live in. You lift your head from this book dazed and blinking in new light. These are jaw-dropping stories. "
"Slut Lullables is daring short fiction at its finest; it explores the full range of modernlife - from love to sex to illness to family - with all the refinement and frankness of Anaïs Nin. If you have any question about the future of the short story, this beguiling collection is its formidable answer."
"Frangello is uncanny and mesmerizing in this smart, suspenseful psychosexual drama as she choreographs traumatic and even criminal family dynamics."
"A Freudian tale of a family‘s twisted past... weaving complex issues of sexuality, AIDS and eating disorders."
"A refreshing rebuttal to the canard that feminism is humorless....."
"In this reworking of Freud‘s famous case study, a modern-day Dara exacts her revenge, plunging the analyst-reader into a phantasmagoria of neurosis, psychosis, and hysteria which defies resolution or cure. A chilling post-mortem of the Freudian Century."
"In My Sister‘s Continent, Gina Frangello has added unusual and compelling insights into feminist "hot button" topics-bulimia, incest, AIDS-steering them off over-used, well-worn tracks and into new, sometimes treacherous territory."
"Gina Frangello writes about sex, pyschology and sisterhood with a rare sensitivity and tremendous wit. This is a delightful novel, full of rollicking scenes and uncanny wisdom."
"My Sister‘s Continent is brilliant and timely-readers who find themselves bored and de-sensitized by the recent deluge of shock-value lit will be blindsided by this truly disturbing and undeniably germane piece of work...[T]he power issues at work between women and men and family today are bared three-dimensionally here, and Frangello‘s only agenda is honesty. The results are stunning, and readers will come away from this book changed."
