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    Made for Love: A Novel
    Made for Love: A Novel
    Made for Love: A Novel
    Audiobook10 hours

    Made for Love: A Novel

    Written by Alissa Nutting

    Narrated by Suzanne Elise Freeman

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Soon to be an HBO Max series starring Ray Romano and Cristin Milioti 

    NAMED A RECOMMENDED READ BY
    GQ • PopSugar • NPR • Huffington Post • Electric Literature • The New Yorker • Publishers Weekly • New York Magazine • Buzzfeed • Refinery29 • Vulture • Nylon

    From one of our most exciting and provocative young writers, a poignant, riotously funny story of how far some will go for love—and how far some will go to escape it. 

    Hazel has just moved into a trailer park of senior citizens, with her father and Diane—his extremely lifelike sex doll—as her roommates. Life with Hazel’s father is strained at best, but her only alternative seems even bleaker. She’s just run out on her marriage to Byron Gogol, CEO and founder of Gogol Industries, a monolithic corporation hell-bent on making its products and technologies indispensable in daily life. For over a decade, Hazel put up with being veritably quarantined by Byron in the family compound, her every movement and vital sign tracked. But when he demands to wirelessly connect the two of them via brain chips in a first-ever human “mind-meld,” Hazel decides what was once merely irritating has become unbearable. The world she escapes into is a far cry from the dry and clinical bubble she’s been living in, a world populated with a whole host of deviant oddballs.

    As Hazel tries to carve out a new life for herself in this uncharted territory, Byron is using the most sophisticated tools at his disposal to find her and bring her home. His threats become more and more sinister, and Hazel is forced to take drastic measures in order to find a home of her own and free herself from Byron’s virtual clutches once and for all. Perceptive and compulsively readable, Made for Love is at once an absurd, raunchy comedy and a dazzling, profound meditation marriage, monogamy, and family.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperAudio
    Release dateJul 4, 2017
    ISBN9780062681546
    Made for Love: A Novel
    Author

    Alissa Nutting

    Alissa Nutting is an assistant professor of English at Grinnell College. She is the author of the story collection Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls, as well as the novel Tampa.

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    Reviews for Made for Love

    3.5/5

    120 ratings9 reviews

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    • 3/5
      Good book! Suzanne Elise Freeman is a good and pleasant narrator EXCEPT for her male voices. She does not (cannot?) vary the male voices at all. All her male characters sound the same, like a 70 year old man. If two male characters are speaking it is so confusing (not knowing which person is speaking) and disheartening. This really took away from the enjoyment of the book.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 2/5
      Better than her first book- Tampa, but that isn’t saying much.
      The themes were there but the story is boring, and not funny at all.
      I don’t know what others see in this author.
    • 4/5
      Interesting book with a satisfying ending that utterly depressed me the whole time I listened.
    • 1/5
      It’s very weird and a waste of time not my cup of tea at all
    • 5/5
      Unique, edgy take on the conundrums of modern love. Well read by the reader, suited the dark sardonic tones of the author and main character . Enjoyed the book’s wide range and introspective depth, and no holds barred take on sexuality, compared to the tv show’s more sanitized approach. Though Milioti is the perfect casting for Hazel.
    • 5/5
      hilarious heartfelt and terrifying. love in the age of Google.
    • 5/5
      Hazel is married to Byron Gogol, tech multi-millionaire. She lives in his compound, The Hub, pretty much under his complete control and surveillance. When he decides to put a chip in her brains so he can mind-meld with her, she flees to her father's trailer. Her father isn't too happy about his new visitor; he's in a honeymoon period with his new sex doll.Meanwhile, Jasper has made a living conning women into falling in love with him and giving him all their money which is easy for him to do as he looks like a very handsome Jesus. His life falls apart when he is attacked by a dolphin who appears to want to mate with him.This is not a book everyone will like. The two protagonists don't even meet until the book is three-quarters done. It is also very weird; many of the happenstances are frankly odd and highly imaginative. However, it is extremely funny, and I loved the black humor vibe. It has a lot to say about our society, social media, tech, relationships, and social norms. The writing is fresh and funny. Thoughts often come as a free association mind drop from either Hazel or Jasper without any filters, often harkening back to past occurrences in their lives. I really enjoyed this book. It was not something I might have picked up on my own, and I'm grateful it was recommended to me.
    • 4/5
      A woman runs away from her techonut husband while her elderly father finds companionship in a sex doll and another man becomes attracted to dolphins in Alissa Nutting's funny, twisted and thoroughly delightful new novel.Made for Love; what does it mean? Hazel's father's doll was manufactured for sex; Hazel herself becomes an object in the eyes of her husband, there to be used for his experiments; and Jasper has created of himself a character who pretends to love women while he steals from them. But at a metaphorical level, or literal if you're religious, the human soul as made for love is a religious concept that reaches back to the Bible. Pope John Paul II said "A person's rightful due is to be treated as an object of love, not as an object for use." All three main characters, and many of the minor ones, have to learn this lesson over the course of this strange and wonderful book.At the outset, Hazel, a young woman in her thirties, abandons her marriage to Byron Gogol. He is founder of a tech company looking to take over the world, or at least the people in it, through the introduction of more and more intrusive technology. Finally he wants to "meld minds" with his wife, in one-sided arrangement that would give him access to her every thought but give her nothing in return. His incursions start out with low-level technostalking when they first meet and escalate to monitoring her without her knowledge 24/7. She wants out; what started out as a loveless marriage for money has become something frightening and deeply threatening and now, hiding at her father's house, she believes Byron will eventually kill her rather than let her go.At the same time her father, who is more ill than he lets on, has taken up with a sex doll named Diane and wants to live out his remaining time in a fantasy world of plastic love. He lets Hazel stay with him for the time being, but only if she agrees to buy him a second doll.Then there's Jasper, a con artist and gigolo who gets a number done on him after an encounter with a dolphin changes him in a way he struggles to come to terms with, first through employment at an aquarium and later through Gogle-sponsored surgery. Eventually all three characters come together, but not in any way I expected.I'm calling this book science fiction because it is deeply concerned with the ways technology affects our lives, and portrays a current-day or near-future world in which technology is threatening to become hyper-intrusive, a world in which we have literally no privacy, not even the privacy of our own thoughts. The beating heart of the narrative is Byron Gogle's company, the extension of his self with its wireless tentacles stretching out, trying to enclose everyone in his life just as a start. Byron/Gogol's grasping is desperate and needy and belies Byron's blasé, blank affect; there's more going on with him than we see, but the whole point is that he is the one character whose interior life we will never see, and that's the way he wants it. As his tentacles get closer and closer to our protagonists I was feeling a real tension and suspense, wondering how this was all going to turn out.The ending is quick but satisfying; an otherwise throwaway character saves the day, and those that remain move on to uncertain but somehow better futures. I really enjoyed Made for Love; it was quirky, hilarious, edgy and at times outlandish, but it kept me reading and held my attention, which is saying a lot for audio fiction. Suzanne Elise Freeman's expert narration helped a lot too; she is expressive and charismatic and brought the words to life. If you have a slightly off-kilter sense of humor and are ready for the unexpected, Made for Love is a great choice for you.
    • 5/5
      If you can, try to attend a book reading to hear author Alissa Nutting read from this funny, sharp novel. She provides a perfect voice in your head for this story. This book is a high-wire act set in the near future - it is hilarious and completely unique and raunchy and kind of terrifying. At the beginning, we find out that main character Hazel has bolted from her insanely rich tech-mogul husband. She shows up at her father's house and discovers him in blissful lust with Diane, a perky sex doll who has just made his life worth living. Oh, it gets better - there might be a chip in someone's head, there is a con man who turns to dolphins for love, and there are also some true-life descriptions of how it feels to be alone in a 'wtf have I done with my life' kind of way. I really appreciate how much attention and life that Nutting gives to every character in her story - you will not forget Hazel and Byron and Fiffany and Liver and Diane and Jasper and Ms. Cheese. This is a very different book than Nutting's novel, Tampa. She is a brave and brilliant writer and this book... wow. Best book about love that I've read in awhile.