Ugh...This was a struggle to get through and I really tried to give Groff a chance. I like family sagas and historical fiction but for me I have to be rewarded with characters (at least one or two) that bond me with the process of keeping track of family trees, scandals and secrets that almost always go with the territory. The "Monsters of Templeton" is definitely not a "Gone with the Wind" or "The Thorn Birds" variety of family saga. You might want to throw in a smidgeon of the weirdness of "Geek Love" to put it in it's more appropriate place. Yet it did not do what all of those books did....produce a story line or character that I cared enough about to keep track of this mess of a family tree. There are a few chances in this book to bond with a character and unfortunately it was always the wrong character for me. This can be blamed largely on the device used by the author of producing and showcasing a different ancestor every chapter. But these characters are quickly trotted out and and within pages dismissed. I liked a couple of these but alas they were gone within a chapter never to appear again and I found myself back in the present with characters I didn't really like. When characters showed up from "Last of the Mohikans" I pulled my nose out of this book and decided "enough is enough". I no longer cared about the overall mystery of parentage. I'd given "The Monsters of Templeton" enough of my time.