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Review Date: 12/23/2013
Helpful Score: 2
Amy Tan sensitively draws the two main characters in this book, with all their vulnerabilities and blind spots. The reader is pulled into Kwan's "Yin World" so convincingly that in many ways it seems more "real" than the "real" world of her sister, Olivia ("Libby-ah"). This book truly enchants, and the story resolves elegantly. Beautifully written, compelling storytelling.
Review Date: 12/24/2013
I have to give this book five stars, though I "loved it" not because Chris McCandless himself was amazing but because I believe that it brought me (of all people) to some understanding of the guy. That is Krakauer's singular--and yes, "amazing"--accomplishment here. McCandless seems to evoke extreme reactions from many people (as evidenced by the reviews here). On one hand there are those who are starry-eyed with adulation of his stubborn pursuit of "freedom." On the other (and obviously, I was in this camp), there are those of us giving ourselves ocular hernias with our eye-rolling disparagement--even bordering on anger--of his utter stupidity (or more rightly, his insistence on remaining ignorant) of some of the simplest edicts about how to survive in the so-called "wilderness." Turns out, McCandless wasn't in the "wild" at all, but about 30 miles from a town, and about a half-mile walk to a bridge that would have saved his life. But what Krakauer made me see was that McCandless wanted to think that he was out in the wild, and so he eschewed maps, or any knowledge of where he actually was. If he was lost, then he was free. Krakauer points this out toward the end of the book: in this day and age, there are few, if any, places left on the planet that aren't known, that haven't been mapped. So McCandless threw away the map in order to be lost. I don't advise this to anyone who wants to keep on living, but I get it. McCandless lived his philosophy, however half-baked, all the way out to its ultimate conclusion. Who among us does that? I suppose I have to give him credit. And regardless of what you think of Chris McCandless, Jon Krakauer is an amazing writer, and this book is well worth the read.
Review Date: 1/14/2014
Helpful Score: 1
An interesting read, mainly for the insider's view of the workings of the LDS church. This book is more of a personal testimony than I expected, but still worth reading. For an absolutely superb historical review of Mormonism and the splintering of the church into fundamentalism and a more culturally palatable version, read "Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith" by Jon Krakauer.
Review Date: 11/20/2013
Helpful Score: 1
Writing for the New York Times Book Review, Stacey D'Erasmo perfectly captured my personal reaction to this book: one is "continually being told how magical the circus and its denizens are without ever being truly surprised, enchanted, or beguiled." It's a lovely little novel, well written and passably entertaining, but I found all the hyperbole surrounding it to be overblown. Nothing described in the book seemed terribly unusual or unexpected. Because the time-shifting device wasn't at all necessary to the tale, it served only as a confusing contrivance. The bits and pieces of stories that are doled out throughout the book set up the reader to expect an integrated finale in which all is revealed and tied together, but instead, much is left unresolved and unexplained. Apart from her repeated comma splices, which I found irritating, the author is a talented writer. However, the overall effect of this novel as a whole is shallow and unsatisfying.
Review Date: 1/22/2014
Ah trahed tah red dis book, ah rillah did trah. But ah jes cood nawt mayn-tayn mah consen-trayshun bicos uv dah way dat de author wrote dah dialeck. It wus jes too distrak-tin'. Ah had ta red da dialog ober an ober so's ah cood unnahstan' it, an' it wus jes too confoo-sin'. It gon disrupted dah flow uv dah text. So's ah be gibbin up.
Review Date: 9/7/2013
Helpful Score: 3
I don't think I have ever read a work of fiction before that is nearly 500 pages long and in which nothing happens. "Nothing" -- not as in a lack of car chases or plot twists, but as in a complete absence of the elements that make the stuff of good fiction: character development, conflict, change of any kind. O'Nan's book is stuffed with the mundane details of everyday life, which he does an exacting job of chronicling in painfully minute detail (right down to the scene in which one of the characters has a bout of diarrhea in the bathroom). Yet by the end of these pointless meanderings, none of the characters has grown in any way, or gained any insight into either themselves or one another. They remain static, isolated from one another, and eminently unlikeable. Small, niggling details remain unanswered (why is one character's name spelled two different ways? Bad editing? At first I thought there might be a pattern according to how she was thought of by the other characters, but finally I just gave up and tried to ignore the nagging discrepancy). O'Nan is great at eliciting the familiar details of family interactions and the physical environment, but so what? that in itself doesn't make a novel. The book reads like one long exercise in a fiction-writing workshop. I trudged on until the end, hoping for something, anything, to justify its existence, but to no avail. I'll never get back the hours of my life I wasted reading this book.
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