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American Pop: A Novel
American Pop: A Novel
American Pop: A Novel
Audiobook12 hours

American Pop: A Novel

Written by Snowden Wright

Narrated by Robert Petkoff

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

3/5

()

About this audiobook

"The House of Forster is built on bubbles; watching each wealth-addled generation try not to blow the family fortune and/or disgrace its name provides not only excellent Southern Gothic fun but a panoramic tour of the American Century."— Jonathan Dee, author of the Pulitzer Prize finalist The Privileges

The story of a family.
The story of an empire.
The story of a nation.

Moving from Mississippi to Paris to New York and back again, a saga of family, ambition, passion, and tragedy that brings to life one unforgettable Southern dynasty—the Forsters, founders of the world’s first major soft-drink company—against the backdrop of more than a century of American cultural history.

The child of immigrants, Houghton Forster has always wanted more—from his time as a young boy in Mississippi, working twelve-hour days at his father’s drugstore; to the moment he first laid eyes on his future wife, Annabelle Teague, a true Southern belle of aristocratic lineage; to his invention of the delicious fizzy drink that would transform him from tiller boy into the founder of an empire, the Panola Cola Company, and entice a youthful, enterprising nation entering a hopeful new age.

Now the heads of a preeminent American family spoken about in the same breath as the Hearsts and the Rockefellers, Houghton and Annabelle raise their four children with the expectation they’ll one day become world leaders. The burden of greatness falls early on eldest son Montgomery, a handsome and successful politician who has never recovered from the horrors and heartbreak of the Great War. His younger siblings Ramsey and Lance, known as the “infernal twins,” are rivals not only in wit and beauty, but in their utter carelessness with the lives and hearts of others. Their brother Harold, as gentle and caring as the twins can be cruel, is slowed by a mental disability—and later generations seem equally plagued by misfortune, forcing Houghton to seriously consider who should control the company after he’s gone.

An irresistible tour de force of original storytelling, American Pop blends fact and fiction, the mundane and the mythical, and utilizes techniques of historical reportage to capture how, in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s words, “families are always rising and falling in America,” and to explore the many ways in which nostalgia can manipulate cultural memory—and the stories we choose to tell about ourselves.

LanguageEnglish
PublisherHarperAudio
Release dateFeb 5, 2019
ISBN9780062892096
Author

Snowden Wright

Born and raised in Mississippi, Snowden Wright is the author of American Pop, a Wall Street Journal WSJ+ Book of the Month and NPR Best Book of the Year. He has written for The Atlantic, Salon, Esquire, The Millions, and the New York Daily News, among other publications, and previously worked as a fiction reader at The New Yorker, Esquire, and The Paris Review. Wright was a Marguerite and Lamar Smith Fellow at the Carson McCullers Center, and his small-press debut, Play Pretty Blues, received the Summer Literary Seminar’s Graywolf Prize. He lives in Yazoo County, Mississippi.

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Reviews for American Pop

Rating: 3.16 out of 5 stars
3/5

75 ratings26 reviews

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  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    The Forster family patriarch, Tewksbury, was a Scottish immigrant who opened a pharmacy in Panola, Mississippi in the late 1800's. Many pharmacies of the day had a soda fountain, as did the Forsters'. Tewksbury developed his own recipe for a cola drink that quickly became popular in the county. As he began to mass produce it he struggled for a name, eventually settling on Panola Cola. In it's day Pan Cola was bigger than Coke or Pepsi. Just past the title page is the Forster family tree. I must have looked back at it fifty times to keep everybody straight. The story is not told in a linear fashion. The interaction of all the Forsters shapes the history of Panola Cola. For example, the secret ingredient in the drink was never passed on to the third and fourth generation Forsters. This is a sprawling history of the United States told through a cola dynasty. I enjoyed it very much.
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    This book about the fictional family that owned the equally fictional Panola Cola was an interesting idea, but it simply was a very hard book to finish. The author introduced way too many main characters and then proceeded to jump around from one year to another in no logical way whatsoever....Don't get me wrong, I like books with "flashbacks" to earlier happenings, but usually those years are at least mentioned at the beginning of the chapter, make even the smallest amount of sense in the development of the story, and stay within that time for the length of the chapter. This book has many different time "zones" within each chapter... basically every paragraph is a different time and new characters are introduced without any idea of why they are even there and what year this new action is actually happening in!It seems like the author had all these great ideas for developing the main characters and then simply wrote all of the thoughts down on post-it notes that he jumbled up in a "button bag" (thanks to "Project Runway "for the idea!) and simply typed them up as he pulled them out of the bag.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Southern Gothic meets Dynasty in this family saga of a Mississippi family that founds Panola Cola, a Coca Cola-like drink complete with a secret ingredient. This is a family that definitely puts the fun into dysfunctional. Each of the family's children is flawed as are their children and we watch as the third generation runs the once mighty company into the ground. There's every kind of sexual sin you can imagine, there are people with physical and mental challenges, there is business duplicity, and then there are the normal vagueries of Southern Society with all the horrors attendant to Southern fiction. Pour yourself some pop, sit back and enjoy.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    American Popby Snowden Wright 2019Harper Collins 3.5 / 5.0 A story of a family´s rise to wealth through a family owned corporation, Panola Cola of Mississippi. Sounds like a great story.Like a soda that has lost its carbonation, this just pours flat. It is very s...l....o....w.. , to many characters, and a timeline that jumps around, sometimes within the same paragraph, and it makes overall story confusing, hard to follow and hard to get into,This is not a bad bool, parts were very good, but the formatting had it hard to get engaged in the story. I did like Imogene and Ramsey, tho.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    I'm ticked off. I liked the sounds of the blurb on the back of American Pop, and was quite happy to have won a copy thru Goodreads! But it was in my mind, a silly book. Too critical? maybe. The dynastic aspect regarding a soda company founding family had great potential but it fell flatter than a pancake. Not even a made for tv movie...tho MAYBE a made for tv soap opera??
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A cautionary tale about the rise and fall of an American success story. What can go wrong when you get all you want. And don't talk to one another. Strong character development. Good interaction with the times of the story.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    It's unfortunate that a pretty intriguing story was marred by an awkward structure. The frequency (and seeming haphazardness) with which the narrative jumped between characters, time periods, and locations was exhausting, to the degree that I had to put the book away for a while because it hurt my brain to keep track of it all (I used the family tree extensively to help me keep track of who was who and when they lived.) It's too bad because I think I would have really enjoyed this if it had been a little less all over the place.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Just like an icy glass of coke on a hot summer's day, American Pop by Snowden Wright was a refreshing break to the (slightly) more serious reading that I've been doing. This is a soap opera, a family saga where the story shifts quickly between the various family members, going back and forth in time, to tell the story of an American family's rise and fall. When Houghton Forster developed a cola drink to serve in his father's pharmacy, he had no idea that it would be so popular. Houghton's a savvy businessman, though, and quickly takes advantage of the soda's popularity to make it a national product that becomes a standard beverage throughout the US and the world. Although firmly rooted at their home in Mississippi, the money that Panola Cola's success brings with it means that the next generation can move comfortably in high society, but not necessarily that they, or the following generation, have what it takes to keep the family business profitable. Ranging from Panola County, Mississippi, to the battlefields of WWI France, to New York, to Hollywood and the Peabody Hotel in Memphis, American Pop also jumps back and forth through the timeline, so that a character's death is described before his first kiss, or a divorce before the marriage. It's a hard trick to pull off, juggling all the characters and their lives in a non-chronological way, but Wright pulls it off. The novel is pure entertainment that manages not to lose the story in all of that intricate structure.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I wanted to like this book more than I did. It promised to be an interesting story about a family dynasty and their soda pop company. The story was interesting, and the characters were as well. But the author jumped around in the timeline so frequently, and so abruptly, and used a lot of foreshadowing as well, which made it a very confusing read.
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    This book just did not work for me. It rambled too much, jumping all over. Very confusing. I would start on an interesting part and instead of staying with that portion of the story the author would again jump to either something in the past or something that would happen in the future. This could have been a really interesting story if it stayed on a lineal path. I was curious about why so many in the family died so young - and within mostly the same year. But I couldn't sort it all out.
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    Well, this is a DNF For me. I actually won this through librarything, but I couldn't get through it. I didn't like the set-up of the chapters.i didn't like the racist tone of the book. I'm so sad, because I was really looking forward to reading this novel. However, I just couldn't do it. Sigh.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Here we have a multigenerational family-run corporate dynasty story. Dysfunction? Check. Great Events of History? Check. Wacky characters? Closeted characters? Racism? Check, check, and check. There’s also so much foreshadowing I needed extra light. My least favorite TV episodes are the ones where X happens at the beginning and then there’s a title: “24 hours earlier...” This book has a ton of that, without the “X amount of time earlier” title. I knew the causes would be revealed eventually, but I wasn’t particularly motivated to do the work required (because I could guess, and I didn’t care). I did, however, read it all.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I love family sagas. I loved Jane Smiley's trilogy and Flesh and Blood by Michael Cunningham. I am now a fan of Snowden Wright's American Pop. Following three generations of a the first family of soda pop, we follow the Forster's through politics, marriages, heartaches, and disillusionment. And that is just the beginning. Although the story centers around a soda pop company that predates Pepsi or Coke, the story is much more about family, relationships, and the strength and destruction of both. I found Ms. Wright's writing style very easy to read and yet descriptive in a way that gave color to even the most bland parts of the story. Following the Forster family kept me engaged and entertained and I would read another book by Ms. Wright in a heartbeat.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This is an epic multi-generational family saga at its finest. From the family's humble beginnings of its immigrant patriarch to the eventual demise of the once-great family company, this sweeping story is lush with love and heartache, fortune and misfortune. Reminiscent of Joyce Carol Oates's "We Were the Mulvaneys" (which I loved), we are brought into the inner folds of four generations of the fictional Forster family. When Houghton Forster was a teenage boy helping out at his father's drug store, he accidentally invented a cola soda unlike anything ever seen before. Around the same time, he was courting the daughter of one of the most prominent families in town. Parlaying his invention into a popular business venture, he won the girl and created a prosperous business that would allow his future family decades of fame and fortune.The first of its kind, Panola Cola - or PanCola - named after the southern town where it was invented, became a nationwide hit. As Houghton's family grew, so did the business. Their eldest son, Montgomery, has a life-altering secret that he keeps from his wife and family. The middle children, twins Lance and Ramsey, go through life as privileged spoiled brats who eventually grow up after years of cavorting without a care in the world. The youngest son, Harold - known as Haddie - has a mental handicap that renders him somewhat useless and therefore largely ignored by the rest of the family. The book jumps around so much it can be very hard to follow. I referenced the family tree in the beginning of the book many times, even after I was familiar with how each family member related to the others. Jumping time frames as well as jumping character to character made for a confusing read. However, I also really liked how the story was told because it kept me on my toes and the chapters were short enough that there was always something happening that revealed itself to be relevant to the other tales within the book.The family looms large within the story, of course, but so does the family business. One could almost believe that PanCola was truly the forefather of Coke and Pepsi. And one could almost believe that this was a biography told by a historian researching the Forster family. But it's not, and that's part of the beauty of this spectacular tale. I won this book from LibraryThing.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    The book was fine; I even enjoyed it. The literary aspect was there, but it never merged into what I felt was a cohesive, compelling story. The legion of characters had so many fractured vignettes that it felt like a compendium of micro stories just out of focus that never resolved into a crisp overall big picture. At least, not to me. I did enjoy the setting of the "cola wars." I honestly finished it because I felt like I should (because this was a pre-published Advance Reader Copy that I received free of charge in exchange for this obviously unbiased review), not because it was particularly gripping. Still, I did enjoy several of the story lines individually. It seemed to me that the author picked a great setting, and had a good story to tell, but he just really wanted it to be a "sweeping family saga" so bad that it was forced. It needed to be either a lot longer, to give more about each character and really delve into more than just the highlights of their lives, or about half as long, with about a third fewer characters. But as I often do, I'm going to end by saying, hey, it's way better than I could write, and I'm sure it'll be plenty of other folks' cup of tea.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I really enjoyed this book. It gripped me from the start "American Pop" is the story of the fictional Forster family, the first family of the soft drink industry, whose lives went from poverty to fame, to tragedy, to nothing in 4 generations. It read like a movie, with the scenes changing from the 1940s to the trenches of WWI in France, to the early 1900s. Interesting Southern characters, full of all the secrets, tensions, and deceit like those in the fiction of Faulkner. Many plot twists, and the appearances of some real life personages like Josephine Baker, move the story along. I thought the author's prose was descriptive, and it held my attention to the very end.
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    Unfortunately, I was unable to finish this one. I got bored with both the plot and the characters. I gave up when I was a third of the way through.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Like a Southern Royal Tenenbaums. Rise and fall of a family filled with love, deception, secrets, mistakes and at least a few relatable moments. There are a few spots that are a little wordy, but what good person from the South doesn't use 3 words to tell a story when 1 will do?
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    American Pop by Snowden Wright is a multi-generational story following the rise and fall of their cola dynasty. It was an engaging, interesting story, and although the reader knows the ultimate outcome from the start, the depressing subject-matter is difficult to take at times. There are many points of view tracing the successes and failures of this southern family over a hundred year timeline.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Oh how I wanted to love this book! Unfortunately the structure was too disjointed & disorienting. I think I would've enjoyed it much more if it were told in a linear format. The plot is solid and the characters are interesting but I was too frustrated with the jumping back & forth in time to truly connect with the story. I think the author is talented but unfortunately chose the wrong structure/format to tell this story.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    This book could have been a great “family saga” novel but fell way short. There is no cohesiveness between the anecdotes presented, and the many tangents cross a confusing number of time periods. I put this one down in frustration.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Looking at the other reviews is interesting. I was not bothered by the out of sequence narrative however I did find other aspects of the book troubling. I enjoy family sagas and have read a number so I look for an author to add something new. Unfortunately that rarely happened in American Pop. There were a couple interesting ideas, how things can go unsaid even in good relationships and lead to disaster. It is never clear why the characters act in that way. Many characters have traumatizing sexual experiences which almost at times seem like plot devices rather than having any meaning in the story. In sum, potential gone unfulfilled.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Reading this novel is taking a stroll through the Panola Cola Historical Museum. Each chapter contains a loose assemblage, a seemingly haphazard arrangement that guides the visitor through the history of Panola Cola, the Forster family, and the American South of the twentieth century. The chapter titles are curious hints of what’s to come as the story swiftly changes characters and jumps back and forth through time. The family genealogy at the beginning is a helpful tool in navigating the four generations of Forsters. I loved watching the pieces start to come together and understanding the characters more fully. While undoubtedly a serious novel, there is a lightness, sense of humor, and “sweetness” as well.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    An unforgettable story of a Southern family's rise to prominence through the production of soda pop. They aren't necessarily in pursuit of the American Dream but certainly are in pursuit of something.This is an "all happy families/each unhappy family" novel and the Forsters make a lively bunch as each member of the family struggles to find their place in the world even if that world is just their family home.The narrative is not linear and at times it almost seems as if the author is telling you the story through a biographer's lens. The jumping around from the present to the future and then way back to the past and matter-of-fact unfolding of some plot lines can be disorienting. But if a reader can stick with it the book will they will be rewarded with a often sad but always interesting tale.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This novel is a Southern family saga bursting with scandalous behavior, odd personality traits, tragic deaths,the mannerisms of the South and more. The most prevalent adjectives used in reviews were "rollicking and "boisterous" and they are very apropos. Often mirroring real events made famous by others, the Forster family and it's descendants have affairs (gay/straight), illegitimate children, accidents, secrets, misunderstandings- all the components of a true saga. This was a fun, if frustrating read. Not using a straight-forward narrative is fine with me, but this novel felt like the manuscript had been delivered in a ring binder that had exploded and no attempt had been made to put the pages back into any order. The time line jumps all over the place and the narrative switches characters and eras constantly, sometimes on the same page. Characters disappear for so long that when their name reappears I had trouble remembering them. Many loose threads came together at the end, but I felt the novel was too jumpy and that kept pulling me out of the story. I felt many characters were lovingly introduced and then later became mere afterthoughts. Personally I would have preferred more focus on fewer characters. The background of the Deep South, with all it's "issues" was well done in the early years of the story, less so when the Civil Rights movement and other societal issues could have been incorporated. Despite my misgivings about the style of the novel I did enjoy the story and look forward to reading more from Snowden Wright!**Thanks to LibraryThing and William Morrow for the ARC of this novel. As always I offer a fair review!
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I love epic family sagas, and while American Pop was on the lighter side of seriousness as far as epics go, I enjoyed watching the lives of each character unfold. I was also personally disappointed when the company started to go downhill, I rooted as hard as I could to get back its former glory, but alas, it was not to be. I won't give away any more spoilers but this was a captivating novel with relatable and highly interesting characters that you'll find hard to put down!