When We Grow Up, Angelica Baker
When We Grow Up, Angelica Baker
List: $26.99 | Sale: $18.89
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When We Grow Up
A Novel

Author: Angelica Baker

Narrator: Imani Jade Powers

Unabridged: 9 hr 53 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 02/25/2025


Synopsis

For fans of Fleishman is in Trouble and Such a Fun Age, an electrifying novel about six longtime friends whose tropical vacation is interrupted by an unexpected crisis, forcing them to ask how strong their bonds really are

Clare is supposed to be the grown-up one. Married to the love of her life, with a major deal for her first novel, she has everything she thought she wanted. So then why does it all feel so wrong? When she agrees to a weeklong vacation with five of her oldest friends, she is hoping for an escape with the people who know her best. There is Jessie, who won’t stop talking about her new boyfriend; Mac, trying to pretend he hasn’t outgrown the group; Kyle, the eternal peacemaker; and Renzo, who brought them all together but keeps picking fights. And then, of course, there’s Liam, the guy Clare has barely seen since high school but somehow can’t get out of her head—or her bed.

But when a terrifying news alert shatters their peace, it becomes harder to ignore how much the world has changed since they were teenagers. As the resentments and tensions that have always simmered just beneath the surface begin to boil, Clare must ask if their shared history is enough to sustain their friendships, or if growing up might mean letting go.

With crackling wit and emotional fearlessness, When We Grow Up is a provocative portrait of friendship in a world that feels ever more unrecognizable and a searing exploration of what it means to be a good person.

A Macmillan Audio production from Flatiron Books.

About Angelica Baker

Angelica Baker is the author of the novels Our Little Racket and When We Grow Up. Her essays and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, Vogue, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Literary Hub. She lives in St Paul, Minnesota with her husband and two sons.

About Imani Jade Powers

Imani is an actor and screenwriter who has appeared on and off Broadway, and has narrated about 120 audiobooks of all genres, mostly in the YA, fantasy/sci-fi, mystery, and non-fiction genres. She speaks French, has great facility with accents (specifically regional UK accents) as she's lived in Paris, London, and New York, and is constantly working on mastering new dialects. Her narration style is conversational, intimate, and warm and she’s been the recipient of an Audie and three Earphones Awards. She's been an avid reader since her childhood, so to get to marry her two loves of performing and reading in narration is a dream!


Reviews

Goodreads review by emma on March 13, 2025

i'll know i'm fully healed when i can resist adding every low-rated lit fic i see (review to come / thanks to the publisher for the arc)......more

Goodreads review by Sara Ellis on November 24, 2024

The more I think about this book the more I disliked it. It reminds me of the book conversations with friends but the friendships were very hostile. The characters were even more unlikeable. A group of friends from childhood reconnect on a trip to Hawaii. I thought this book sounded fun but it honest......more

Goodreads review by Emily on January 15, 2025

Looking for a book that hits on every hyper-zennial political and culture topic there is without actually giving any substance to any of it? Man, I hate writing negative reviews, but this one was just.not.it. I will give the two major trigger warnings for the book here so you don't have to read thro......more

Goodreads review by The Bookish Elf on March 01, 2025

In Angelica Baker's sophomore novel "When We Grow Up," a group of friends approaching thirty gather for a vacation in Hawai'i, where the tropical paradise serves as both backdrop and contrast to their increasingly fraught relationships. Baker, whose debut "Our Little Racket" explored the aftermath o......more

Goodreads review by Samantha on December 28, 2024

Spoiled, insufferable twenty-something’s reminisce about their college days together, in this eye-rolling bummer of a literary fiction. I couldn’t finish the audiobook, to be honest—the best part of the whole book was the first chapter, which I imagined was a masterful, tight short story that was fo......more


Quotes

Praise for When We Grow Up

“Will appeal to readers who gravitate toward dramatic relationship fiction, a sort of cross between Hanya Yanihariga’s A Little Life and the 1985 Brat Pack movie St. Elmo’s Fire.”
Library Journal

“Sharply observed, sardonic, engaging, intimate, and evocative, When We Grow Up delves into the ways we try and fail to form and foster friendships, both before and after we know how to love well or thoughtfully. It confronts the damage that we cause, the violences we miss, as we bumble through discovering who we are. An exploration of how impossible it can feel, in the face of a world that seems so often invested in our imminent destruction, to want and know how to be good.”
—Lynn Steger Strong, author of Flight

When We Grow Up is novel as anthropological investigation, a study of the class of people for whom adulthood begins at thirty. I laughed, I winced, and I saw much I recognized in Baker’s exploration of how the self is forged not only by the circumstances of our birth and family and education but by our peers and friends.”
—Rumaan Alam, New York Times bestselling author of Entitlement and Leave the World Behind

Praise for Our Little Racket

“Baker is wildly talented and this debut is her gorgeous opening note.”
—Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney, bestselling author of The Nest

“I read [Our Little Racket] greedily, in one dizzying weekend, unable to put it down. . . . The book gets beyond moneymaking hubris to a more basic kind of desire—the fretful, shapeless longing of those who are sidelined to be seen somehow as indispensable.”
The Atlantic

“Never less than gripping . . . It’s impossible not to be swept up in the hard universal truths uncovered within its pages.”
Nylon

“A classic page-turner . . . Elegant writing and razor-sharp analysis.”
Connecticut Post