From the Bookshelf of Reading List 2009…
Find A Copy At
Group Discussions About This Book
No group discussions for this book yet.
What Members Thought
This was compulsively readable, yet oddly unsatisfying. Like many readers, I find Lorrie Moore's short stories excellent, so it may be that this book suffered from the high expectations with which I approached it.
The story just didn't seem to warrant a full-length treatment as a novel - the characters, other than the narrator, were oddly two-dimensional. Actually, make that "including the narrator". Which is probably what sinks the book in the end, because the whole novel is written, to a claust ...more
The story just didn't seem to warrant a full-length treatment as a novel - the characters, other than the narrator, were oddly two-dimensional. Actually, make that "including the narrator". Which is probably what sinks the book in the end, because the whole novel is written, to a claust ...more
Oh, did I want to love this book. Because I love Lorrie Moore. I do, I do. But I thought that this book failed in so many big ways which, unfortunately, overshadowed the lovely things that Moore did with language. It's a schizophrenic little book...a teenager trying to decide who it wants to be (class clown? emo-chick? drama queen? band geek?). I found myself baffled (and even a little insulted) by some of the plot elements which verged on the ludicrous at times. I also found the narrator to be
...more
I read this book a couple of weeks ago, and I've been "sitting" on it, trying to find something to say about this book. All I can offer is the truth--I did not, in any way, connect with this book. The characters weren't presented in a way I could make them "real" for me, the story seemed strained and implausible, with minutia going on for pages upon pages while major plot and/or character reveals were handled in a sentence or two--if they were lucky. I sloughed through it because it was on the I
...more
Sep 16, 2009
Julie
marked it as to-read
