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Oct 27, 2011

Paquita Maria rated it:

Painful. Grim as the Reaper. The mind (and so this book) goes to some dark places with love and attachment, often leaving lovers to expect the worst from one another simply because they can see the horror in their own hearts. Ross explores the darkness-cloaked, menacing landscapes of the mind occupied by an intimate other, the comparisons made between worldviews, needs, habits, desires in life and in the boudoir, and the way that long-term affection so often leaves you reaching your hands tow More...

10 comments like (19 people liked it)

Jul 29, 2010

karen rated it:

oh, mr. peanut - you were so close to earning a five-star rating from me!! and this is probably my failing rather than any fault of the book, in a way, because i had unrealistic expectations based on just sheer enthusiastic nothing. the book starts out so strong, that when it started going mildly wrong for me, i felt betrayed, and maybe took its departure from where i wanted it to be a little personally*. (i call this house of leaves syndrome) i had been shelving this book for at least a month, More...

50 comments like (64 people liked it)

Nov 29, 2010

Kemper rated it:

Why do divorces cost so much?

Because they’re worth it.*

*(That joke brought to you by my ex-wife. Not to be confused with the far superior current Mrs. Kemper. Hi, honey!)

Anyone who has had a long-term relationship that involved living with your significant other has had this moment. Not when you get on each other’s nerves over the trivial crap like hogging all the blankets or not picking up your socks. I’m talking about that moment when you look at someone More...

3 comments like (23 people liked it)

Dec 27, 2011

Christine rated it:

I hope my boyfriend never reads this (although we both know it's true and we both know he know's I know it): men are a joke. It sounds mean if you read it as a judgement, which is not how I mean it - after all, some of my best friends are men! I have the aforementioned boyfriend! But it is simply a statement of fact: in any and all ways requiring complex human compassion and communication, men are comically maladroit. Which is the kind of thought you will stew over and ruminate on while yo More...

4 comments like (2 people liked it)

Apr 12, 2011

Sarah rated it:

Probably more of a 2-1/2 star review. I had to push myself to get through this one. By the end, I was mostly glad I saw it through. The last 50 or so pages redeemed some of the problems I had with the book. And ultimately, this is a significantly better book than I could ever hope to write, in terms of the writing, the plotting, the twists, the tying everything together.

Ultimately, though, I just found the themes of (1) women being murdered brutally by their husbands and (2) wome More...

1 comment like (4 people liked it)

May 30, 2011

Ben added it

At the center of the book is a pretty great 120-page historical novella about Dr. Sam Sheppard, the heart surgeon who did or didn't murder his wife and it plays around in some interesting ways with the impossibility of knowing what actually happened. In my imagination, Adam Ross wrote this and then was pretty hard pressed to figure out how to shape it into something of novel length and has put on either side of it has put a conceptually interesting but kind of poorly written experimental novel. More...

0 comments like (3 people liked it)

Feb 11, 2011

Rosy rated it:

A quote from the real Dr. Sam Sheppard opens the book in the epigraph, "I became or thought that I was disoriented and the victim of a bizarre dream." An appropriate beginning, prophetic for the journey the reader is about to undergo with this novel - a story within a story about marriage, murder, the search for a connection, the disconnect between who you think you are and how others perceive you. Certainly it is how I felt when I finished this dizzying book, and I loved every secon More...

0 comments like (6 people liked it)

Aug 07, 2011

Neil rated it:

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

0 comments like (3 people liked it)

Jan 09, 2012

Rebecca rated it:

Adam Ross' book, Mr. Peanut, should have been titled Mr. Penis. I read this book because it was hyped up all around town here in Nashvegas--Ross is a local author and newly formed celebrity. Mr. Peanut was released to incredible acclaim--the New York Times said Ross is a "sorcerer with words."From Publisher's Weekly we hear: "Ross's depiction of love is grotesque and tender at once, and his style is commanding as he combines torture and romance to create a sense of vertigo-as-roma More...

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Aug 29, 2011

Rachel rated it:

David and Alice Pepin’s marriage is falling apart. When Alice is found dead, David is the prime suspect. The two detectives assigned to the case have their own problems with their wives. Detective Ward Hastroll’s wife has taken to her bed and refuses to leave it and Detective Sam Sheppard was convicted of killing his own wife several years ago and then later exonerated.

This book was fabulous. It’s hard to get too much into the plot without giving something away but the twists took my b More...

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Aug 19, 2011

Elle rated it:

Not my usual genre to read, however, this was an extraordinary story of murder and mayhem that I really enjoyed. I think I was impressed with the handling of Ross's use of surrealism threaded through the book, from tropes of men feeling tiny in the company of women, imagining women larger than men, alluding to some of womens' powers, and mens' weanesses; to father abandonment issues as fear of family leadership, and mother and child deaths as anxiety over losing the sensitive mother side in the More...

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Jul 24, 2011

NJMetal rated it:

Mr. Peanut is a gripping story of the trials and tribulations of the every-marriage. The story follows three married couples through a series of flashbacks. The wife if each couple is found dead, the husbands are the immediate suspects in each case. But did they really do it?

The Pepins are the lead couple in this story. Mrs. Pepin is found dead by her husband and taken in for questioning. The two detectives assigned to interrogate Mr. Pepin each have a sorrdid past with their ow More...

0 comments like

Jul 08, 2011

Gary rated it:

Like Fight Club, but take out Tyler Durden and replace him with a complete pansy. Now you have two pansys just whimpering at each other.

Seriously, though, the book was good at time and bad at times. It's about the darker side of marriage. The focus is on this couple and it's mildly interesting. Then the wife dies by ingesting a mouthful of peanuts (to which she's deathly allergic). The police think murder, the husband thinks suicide.

Then the book just railroads into thes More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Jul 04, 2011

Phloe rated it:

This book made me stick to my diet.

Admittedly, I was quite third-assed about the whole regimen. It didn't really do a whole lot to cut rice out from one's diet if they were going to replace it with a bottle of pinot. Yet one WANTS to justify it - "it's a liquid" or "look at how trim Burroughs was". Sigh.

Mr. Peanut, freshman effort from Mr. Ross, is way better than a lot of first-novelly-thingees proffered forth by others. This is arguably true. One feels t More...

0 comments like

May 25, 2011

Joy rated it:

Yes, the puzzle-piece, shifting narrative structure was interesting, but I am just sick to death of reading/hearing/seeing stories of men who hate women (oh, but they love and marry them too, as if that weren't possible. Come on.). The two main (male) characters, in particular, are cheating pieces of sh*t (I don't know the goodreads policy on cursing, but believe me, it's deserved) who act even worse when their wives have pregnancy-related crises. So, first, we're blaming the women for their rep More...

3 comments like (2 people liked it)

May 06, 2011

Shinelle rated it:

The novel drew me in almost immediately. I sympathized with David Pepin--anybody who's ever been in a long-term relationship probably sympathizes with him--and became emotionally invested in the plot resolution, until the plot began to splinter and re-splinter. The conceit of the novel-within-a-novel was at first fascinating, when I couldn't tell which part is meta-novel and which part is plain old novel, and then became wearisome, as I continued to have difficulty discerning which part is met More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Apr 12, 2011

Jennifer rated it:

The book that was described to me as a good, quick read turned out to be just that. It took me three days to read M.r Peanut, and the story was rarely dull. It does get a little clogged in overexplaining certain meanings in the storylines (the bits about Hitchcock I had to skim after a while) and the stories within stories get a little silly noirish compared to the main narrative sandwiching the book as a whole. But this story, the stories inside it, give you a lot to think about when it comes t More...

0 comments like

Mar 25, 2011

Celina rated it:

I finished Mr. Peanut on the same day I watch Steven Soderbergh's The Girlfriend Experience; an interesting coincidence considering both works feature a disjointed narrative structure. But where Soderbergh's film is a pretentious pastiche of bland dialogue spoken by equally bland characters, with the non-linear structure a necessary distraction (there's no way the story or characters (and I use those terms very loosely) could hold a viewer's attention for a straightforward 75 minutes), the struc More...

0 comments like

Mar 14, 2011

Stephanie rated it:

This book is incredible. And dishvelved. And has about 85 different sub plots. And by the end it gets a little messy. Or unbelievable. But it's still incredible. One of my favorite books, I could not put it down as soon as I started reading it. The sub stories....are incredible. Entrie novels unto themselves, and held on their own, they can stand, particularly the one about Sam Sheppard - which absolutely blew my mind, when I found out it was based on a true story. Should I have known t More...

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Mar 11, 2011

Sarah rated it:

Adam Ross' debut novel Mr. Peanut is extremely original and in a class of its own, with style that reminds me faintly of Chuck Palahniuk. The audience will be caught off-guard and lost in the enigma that is Mr. Peanut.

David Pepin is endlessly devoted to his wife of thirteen years, Alice. Despite their constant relationship ups and downs and Alice's obsession with eating and then losing weight, David has done almost everything imaginable to ensure her happiness. When Alice is found dead More...

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Feb 03, 2011

christa rated it:

There are writers you like, right: The Egans, the Murakamis, the MacInerneys. Their books are good. You'll read all of them. You'll pet the cover and coo. You'll make a BFD about the fact that you really like these writers. But then there are your writers. The writers you like because you feel an invisible umbilical cord connecting your brains. Like, their word choices and sentence arrangements are exactly what you dig, and you wish you had thought of it first, and obviously this writer is cater More...

0 comments like

Jan 27, 2011

jenn rated it:

Damn. Mr. Ross is crazy. And brilliant. I'd say I'm not hoping to achieve half as much with my own first novel, but who am I kidding? I won't accomplish a third.

I wasn't as freaked out by the subject matter of Mr. Peanut as it seems like a lot of people were. Maybe I've just been married long enough to have thought, "Oh, shit, someday something might, you know, happen to one of us." Not that I wish for it, because I'm not as effed up as David Pepin. But who is?

T More...

0 comments like

Dec 14, 2010

Emily rated it:

This novel is more than passing strange--it feels like a meteor that landed from another planet, that you pick up and turn over in your hands, trying to make something of it. Marriage and murder are the themes--marriage as "double homicide," how it erases people, and what they'll do to get themselves back. One wife takes to bed like a Victorian hysteric; a husband writes out his darkest fantasies as a novel; another couple alternate trying to pull closer and push the other away, never More...

1 comment like (1 person liked it)

Dec 01, 2010

Melissa rated it:

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

2 comments like (3 people liked it)

Oct 16, 2010

Lars rated it:

Are we going up or down? Backward or forwards? Does anything ever really begin or end? Will the circle be unbroken? Adam Ross fails to answer those questions in ‘Mr. Peanut,’ but I’m sure that’s the point. He also doesn’t tell us whether we’re going loop de loop or loop de lie in this dark, trick bag of a book. It left me wondering how all those rabbits could keep popping out of the hat, and if there was anything more than that inside there.

Ross has some issues. His women obse More...

0 comments like (3 people liked it)

Oct 06, 2010

Nathan rated it:

This book is incredible, and it will seriously ***k you up. Don't read this novel in a terrible mood--I read it a month ago, on a sunny, oceanside weekend away, and still I'm haunted by it. I will say two things about the book. 1) The narrator, David Pepin, is a game designer who made his fortune on a game called Escher Exit, in which the various levels are taken from those perpetual-motion tessellations that M.C. Escher is famous for; bad guys are chasing you, and you have to try to escape. More...

1 comment like (4 people liked it)

Sep 24, 2010

Sarah "Kat" rated it:

I am going to simply plagarize and re-quote what another review said because it was so right on:

"For a first time author, this is an extremely ambitious book. Full of misdirection, suspense and mystery. The book has some pretty profound things to say about human companionship and marriage.

I was left remembering that our own lives are made up of the banal. That if you can't appreciate the boring tedium of everyday life with someone then you can't really appreciate t More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Sep 24, 2010

Susan rated it:

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

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Sep 12, 2010

Renee rated it:

Adam Ross's inspired debut explores the proximity of violence and love and begins with the death of Alice Pepin, whose lifelong struggle with depression, insecurity, and obesity comes to an abrupt end at her kitchen table when she is found dead with a peanut lodged in her throat. She has suffered suicide by anaphylactic shock—or so claims her husband, David, a quiet computer game programmer obsessed with M.C. Escher, Hitchcock, and working and re-working a draft of his unpublished novel, a viole More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Aug 30, 2010

Corny rated it:

This incomprehensible novel has moments of great brilliance. The discussion of a Hawaiian hike, Hitchcock;s movies, the perils of obesity; each would make a short story. Strung together with numerous other elements, some grounded in true crime some in everyday life, and some in mysticism make this book simply too hard to appreciate. That I enjoyed reading it for the first half is undeniable. However, it bogs down in endless lists of examples when a couple would do, chronological dyslexia and lac More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

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