Eileen's review

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Copy/paste the text below into your blog. <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1474628.The_Monsters_of_Templeton?utm_medium=api&amp;utm_source=blog_review" style="float: left; padding-right: 20px"><img alt="The Monsters of Templeton" border="0" src="http://s3.amazonaws.com/photo.goodreads.com/books/1191468146m/1474628.jpg" /></a> <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1474628.The_Monsters_of_Templeton?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review">The Monsters of Templeton</a> by <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/690619.Lauren_Groff">Lauren Groff</a><br/><br/> <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/18862314?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review"><h3>My review</h3></a> rating: 2 of 5 stars<br/>This book has gotten plenty of glowing reviews, most undeserved. Yes, the history-based chapters are vivid and often riveting--I was especially left wanting more of the epistolary psychological thriller involving friends-turned-enemies Cinammon Averell and Charlotte Franklin Temple. Indeed, it might have been wiser for Groff to write a fully historical novel, as her contemporary characters and the contrived, wouldn't-this-make-a-quirky-independent-movie subplots (a conveniently-placed hysterical pregnancy, a cliched wisecracking friend with lupus and former high school hunk-turned-auto mechanic, a predictable ex-hippie-turned-Jesus-freak mother and bookish-but-lecherous college professor, a lazily-considered supernatural possession that ties things up a little too tidily...) are far weaker. <br/> <br/>Unfortunately, the main character, Willie Upton, has been written with an inclination toward whining and self-mythologizing that passes for "richly drawn". Groff's prose is often clunky, her metaphors strained, her themes (monsters-come-in-many-forms, the inescapability-of-the-past) overstated. I understand that she was aiming for an offbeat, history-meets-magical realism, and her depiction of Templeton and its denizens, past and present, often achieves a visceral clarity (I could smell the sweet mustiness of the historical society building, could envision Glimmey's beautifully described features, for instance). <br/> <br/>Critics have appreciated Groff's ambitiousness, the multiple first-person voices and attempt at a new sort of sweeping American saga rooted in the ahistorical present. I only saw the book as a misguided attempt at biting off more than could be chewed. <br/><br/><a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/list/493204?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review">View all my reviews.</a>