Explore our new BookBrowse Community Forum!

Reviews by Lynn

If you'd like to be able to easily share your reviews with others, please join BookBrowse.
Order Reviews by:
A Visit from the Goon Squad
by Jennifer Egan
A Visit from the Goon Squad (4/25/2012)
A Visit from the Goon Squad interpolates characters that are struggling with the process of aging while at the same time figuring out their paths and direction in life. Although the book was well-written with each chapter an engaging short story of its own, I did not like the book as a whole. The lack of plot and depth of the characters drained my focus from the book, although as previously said the chapters themselves were easy to read.
   Throughout the book Egan uses different voices to express her characters, even featuring a fifty page powerpoint presentation near the end of the book. The various writing views makes the book more intriguing, but once again I feel that the book doesn’t capture the depth of the characters personalities and doesn’t show the change that the characters made in time, it just plots their events throughout the years. Also, make note that before you read this book, there are a huge number of characters. I suggest to not spread out the reading, but rather try to read it consistently. I had to keep referring back to earlier passages in the book to remember who all the characters were and what their relations to other characters were as well. The number of characters made it hard to keep up with what exactly was going on in the chapters, but eventually you can piece together the relations and events.
   As a whole, I would not place this book as a “must-read” and it is definitely not a “relax, sit back, and enjoy” one either. As previously said, I did not like it, but different people have different literature tastes, so I can see how one would like it. However, I am not going to be recommending it.
  • Page
  • 1

Top Picks

  • Book Jacket: Graveyard Shift
    Graveyard Shift
    by M. L. Rio
    Following the success of her debut novel, If We Were Villains, M. L. Rio's latest book is the quasi-...
  • Book Jacket: The Sisters K
    The Sisters K
    by Maureen Sun
    The Kim sisters—Minah, Sarah, and Esther—have just learned their father is dying of ...
  • Book Jacket: Linguaphile
    Linguaphile
    by Julie Sedivy
    From an infant's first attempts to connect with the world around them to the final words shared with...
  • Book Jacket
    The Rest of You
    by Maame Blue
    At the start of Maame Blue's The Rest of You, Whitney Appiah, a Ghanaian Londoner, is ringing in her...

Members Recommend

  • Book Jacket

    Pony Confidential
    by Christina Lynch

    In this whimsical mystery, a grumpy pony must clear his beloved human's name from a murder accusation.

Who Said...

Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics...

Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!

Wordplay

Solve this clue:

F the M

and be entered to win..

Your guide toexceptional          books

BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.