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Oct 12, 2007

Lizzie rated it:

I have never been very good at describing books to people.
Mostly, I think, because the story has already been told in a way uniquely perfect to itself.
And how could I try to improve upon that?
So I will not describe this book to you, at least not in detail.
It is 615 pages long, so even the description would be rather lengthy.
But I will tell you to read it.
Because you should.
I don't even know if you will like it.
I have read some reviews of it that we More...

1 comment like (9 people liked it)

Mar 25, 2008

Aaron rated it:

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here

2 comments like (4 people liked it)

Mar 13, 2008

Drew rated it:

Let's start with, "...Oh, my god..." in a very, very good way. So good, I kissed its cover when I finally finished it. What - you've never done that?

Now, first of all, I'll admit that there are a good 100-150 pages that could really be lobbed off the top. That being said, you must understand that it is these 100-150 pages that could either pull you in further or annoy you incredibly. Fortunately, myself belonging to the former category, there is a payoff to getting to k More...

0 comments like (4 people liked it)

Nov 19, 2007

Hashi rated it:

Even though I have slightly less than zero recreational reading time these days, I borrowed this fat hardcover book from the library last week. I'm about 20 pages into it, and loving both the premise and the style. It'll probably take me months to get through it.

Hmm, I just read all the other reviews on this site, and wonder if I should have chosen such a deep and dense book to read in my snatched ten minutes here and there ... we'll see how it goes.

11-19: Well, it took m More...

0 comments like (5 people liked it)

May 15, 2007

Amanda rated it:

Finally finished this epic on Sunday night. The sheer size of the book itself -- and the fact that it's a beautiful product and I didn't want to mess it up -- made it a bit difficult to lug around for subway reading. Anyway -- this story is phenomenal. I've never read a book like it, and I always appreciate originality, and not only is it original but it's beautifully written, the characters -- unlike this run-on sentence -- are extraordinarily well constructed (Pickie Beecher should go down as More...

0 comments like (3 people liked it)

Mar 19, 2008

Kecia rated it:

The only reason I picked this up, and the only reason I stuck it out for all 615 pages, was because I was captivated by the initial premise of the story -- people marooned in a children's hospital post-apocalypse -- and I wanted to see how it would resolve itself. Maybe it was because of my attachment to the premise that I found myself bogged down by the huge amount of (very well-written) detail about the characters' interior lives and the activities of a children's hospital. These things by the More...

1 comment like (3 people liked it)

Aug 22, 2007

Kristen rated it:

One my my biggest gripes with modern fiction is that there are so few epic tales told in interesting ways. Say what you want about Stephen King, but I have never put down one of his books feeling bored or, worse, uninterested. One of the reasons I love the Harry Potter books is it's grand scope of story. The books I've been most attracted to recently are the ones that manage to tell a story in an interesting way. That's all. Not so hard, right? I read this book, The Children's Hospital, ab More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Jun 21, 2007

Adam rated it:

"I have such violent dreams, and yet they are never nightmares. The nightmare is the one where I wake up fifty years from now, happily married, and see a picture by my bed of the family I have happily fathered, every face smiling, every heart black with the sin I put in it."

I read this book months ago and I'm still thinking about it, so I figured it deserved a bit more of a statement than just 5 stars. That quote above is, I think, a representative one from the book. If More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Jan 29, 2008

Danny rated it:

This book kept me up at night, NeverEnding story style, rain pounding the windows -- I was left paranoid and enchanted, wondering, hoping it would all come true. My wife would wake up to me shouting out the window into the deluge, "JEMMA!"

The ending left me bewildered and wanting more, but not in a bad way. It felt that it couldn't have ended any other way; it seems complete honest and personal, and I am left needing to know more about Chris Adrian. Did he have a brother t More...

1 comment like (2 people liked it)

Dec 16, 2009

oriana rated it:

This is one of the latest offerings from McSweeney's Rectangulars. It's gotten a lot of press from unexpected corners, even including Oprah's magazine. And it is all deserved--this book is sensational. The plot is dazzlingly original, the characters are compelling, and the voice is just fantastic. This is one of the best books I've read in a long time.

*****************************************************************

(update:)
I've just finished reading and crying bot More...

1 comment like (3 people liked it)

Dec 17, 2009

Lena rated it:

I hit the biggest brick wall ever while reading this novel. What could have been a wonderful piece of modern fiction was instead an overblown, poorly-presented, self-assured, long-winded and ultimately unsatisfying attempt at science fiction.

To be fair, parts of this novel were wonderful. These parts were all contained in a young gay cruise ship passenger's diary, where he documents his sexual exploits in code using Presidents' names.

But in the end, my housemate an More...

1 comment like (3 people liked it)

Jan 26, 2011

Corey rated it:

Oh Yeah, SPOILERS.

A fairly strange book, in the sense that I never knew exactly where it was taking me. Two hundred pages of hospital melodrama with hardcore medschool level diseases and afflictions start this one off, albeit there's quite a bit of "Angels" and whatnot thrown in, plus the world ends. However, this doesn't seem to faze the Hospital peoples, as they basically go on about their daily business of trying to keep the kids alive and whatnot, even though they have More...

4 comments like (3 people liked it)

Sep 16, 2007

Barbara rated it:

This was a really amazing book, I read it in like a week which is really saying something. It's really hard to describe because it was like no other book I have ever read which is probably one of the reasons I liked it so much. I happened to be in public the night I finished it (won't say where because I probably shouldn't have been reading)and had to hide behind the book because I was crying so hard.

1 comment like (2 people liked it)

Sep 27, 2007

Alexandra rated it:

I waited two years for this book to come out and it changed my life accordingly. While I do not regularly muse on the likelihood of an angry God, Adrian's obsession with sin and consequences is ever fascinating, and his characters/their situation solemnly comment on all aspects of the human condition. I finished this on a plane with tears in my eyes.

1 comment like (2 people liked it)

Nov 21, 2007

Rachel rated it:

After 615 pages of madness, the book has ended. This is the best book in the world. I understand that there can only be one best book, so if I find a better book, I will come back and change this review.

1 comment like (2 people liked it)

Aug 20, 2008

Amber rated it:

This book took a long time for me to read (its over 600 pages) but Chris Adrians words are beautiful and it was nice to savor them.

The first half of the book is smooth and quick reading. Not because its better than the second half-just because the author is very good at introducing his characters and forming relationships and surprising us. He never abandons these attributes. The story just gets more complex.

I felt a connection with Jemma that I have never felt with any o More...

2 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jan 20, 2008

Gail rated it:

Rage or sadness? From which emotion springs the better decisions and consequently the better reactions for individuals, for the world?

From Publishers Weekly
Medicine, magic, the biblical story of Noah and sociological ruminations about Americans in the throes of the apocalypse come together in physician Adrian's hip, wry and ambitious debut. When the world is submerged beneath seven miles of water, only those aboard the Children's Hospital, a working medical facility and ark bu More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Feb 11, 2009

Bruiser rated it:

I am struggling to get through this book, of which I have read about a third of. For a short time I found the chraracter study chapters interesting, but then they became routine, and the characters are lacking the development they should by this point in the story.
I am also thinking that had Adrian written less about arcane medical terminology, I would be much more excited about this book. I don't have the time or desire to look up the diseases and procedures he write about in length. I r More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Oct 25, 2007

Sara rated it:

this book, to me, feels like playing pretend on a huge wonderful scale. it exists in the most real way in the world of imagination. and it is so blissfully long! i don't really want to finish.

update:
okay but now i did finish, and i was not disappointed. In a lot of ways, I was reminded of Harry Potter in the scope and magnitude and level of imagination and complete definition of an unfamiliar world, except The Children's Hospital soared over all of Harry Potter's weaknesses More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Apr 22, 2008

Brian rated it:

It's hard to know what to say here: I have a distinctly personal relationship with this novel. I want a copy issued to every American, but I don't think I can ever talk to anyone else about it.

"Children's Hospital" mercilessly pokes holes in whatever shield each of uses to ignore (forgo) recognizing what's happening around us: what we do to each other and how little we think about it. Lazy optimism and contented abstractions crumbled.

But despite how this might More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Dec 11, 2007

Jenifer rated it:

I liked this book. I did. But, at the same time, I found it unsettling, and not beacause it's about the end of the world. Many, many mysteries were brought up in the book, but very few were solved (or maybe I just didn't get it). I liked many aspects of the writing style (flashbacks, sudden gear changes in a chapter, people's thoughts interjecting the narrative without warning) though the beginning of the book, dealing with the hospital and illnesses, was quite technical and, as a layman in the More...

1 comment like (1 person liked it)

Oct 08, 2007

Hannah rated it:

In the eddys between high-voltage plot progression (sex! apocalypse! code blue!) and scintillating character exposition,(creepy little kids with dark minds and incomplete bowels!) I prodded my out-of-literary-practice brain to understand the loftier aims of this novel.

The best I could make of it is an allegory about grief; the obsessive, ego-centric and circuitous process of letting go. What other prerequisites for the heroine role has Jemma fulfuilled but a tremendous amount of los More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jan 10, 2008

Missy rated it:

When a great deluge covers the world in 7 miles of water, nobody survives except for the people inside the Children's Hospital. Luckily for them, most of the patients went into crisis and did not notice that the children's hospital had detached from the rest of the hospital and was floating on it's own. Well, sort of on it's own - but you have to read the book to find out how the hospital stays afloat. After the initial shock wears off doctors, med students, patients and their families spend the More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Dec 16, 2009

Edan added it

Okay. So I brought this on a trip with me--lugged the damn thing across the country--only to barely open it. I admire Adrian's prose, and his ambition, and I like the marrying of the hyper-realist and the surreal in this novel, but it moved so slowly, and tediously, and I never wanted to read it. Finally, finally, after 276 pages, I gave up. I rarely do this, but I wanted so badly to read on my vacation. I wanted a good, juicy, smart, beautiful read. A good read! Anything to get some pages turn More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Aug 29, 2007

Joseph rated it:

A beautiful and ruthless combination of science, religion, and natural human progression. This is not a book that praises the unseen force of faith or the steady hand of practice but humanizes them and makes them fallible. There are moments in The Children's Hospital that are perfectly written. You know where you are, who you are with and what you are feeling even if you cannot understand the why of it. Some may say it is slow in places and that is not entirely untrue. These brief moments are ne More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Dec 14, 2008

Kristin rated it:

This is a thick book and when I discovered the many Biblical undertones, I was unsure of whether I would be able to finish, because while I am Christian, I have never read the Bible and thus have only minimal understanding of the text within. However, this book took me beyond my ignorance by intertwining the religion with the stories of those individuals trapped within the hospital. I won't put any spoilers here because I was glad no one had spoiled the book for me, but to me there were two halv More...

0 comments like

Nov 25, 2009

Drew rated it:

I can't bring myself to recommend a 600-page book that loses so much momentum after the first half. One day, God sends a second flood to destroy all life on earth, except for the inhabitants of a children's hospital full of a Catch-22-like cast of hyper-quirky adults and surreally ill children. As the ark floats through an almost entirely deserted ocean-world, the inhabitants are left to ponder ethical social and spiritual questions, to wonder how we lost our way and what the new world will be l More...

2 comments like

Oct 12, 2009

Tim rated it:

I've been unable even to approach reviewing this novel for weeks and weeks; coming to grips with it is like trying to grab smoke. But its tang stays in the air, and sooner or later you have to open a window to let it dissipate and be on its way. So then.

This magical, ethereal, unusual novel hits a wrong note or two, and it's a long, long journey, but it's so rich, so very rewarding. It's been awhile since I've approached a clearly unusual novel and thought, "That could be awesom More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Aug 18, 2011

Mike rated it:

This is an unusual, strange, dark and disturbing book. I’d best overall describe it as being a science fiction allegory. It’s impressive in its own way, well-crafted, and obviously a serious writing achievement. It’s also frequently unpleasant to read, often weird, and at times grotesque. Most of the time while reading it I felt like I was in “the twilight zone.” By the end I was somewhat numb and fathoming “what did it all mean?” without feeling sure of any answer. Who or what, for instance, d More...

0 comments like

Jan 15, 2010

Sharon rated it:

I started this book about a week ago. It is without a doubt one of the strangest books I have ever read. "A hopsital is preserved, afloat, after the earth is flooded beneath seven miles of water." The 700 very ill children and a group of doctors, attendings, residents, interns and nurses, together with family who were visiting the children, are the only survivors in the world. It was hard to get started but finally got absorbed in the story. Things are no longer as they seemed before t More...

1 comment like