The Brunson family has imploded. Told from the perspective of the 4 adult members of the family this story starts as a slow burn. The characters are all drowning in the minutia of their own existences and cannot seem to figure out how to move forward. Corporate downsizing, empty nest, post-grad stall, xanax, and PTSD - this family is running the gamut of 21st century problems. The author uses their four separate voices to create fully formed characters in whom we become invested. Together they form a family who, for better or worse, keep moving forward to some type of personal and familial resolution. The characters are flawed and altogether human, not necessarily likeable in the beginning, but by the novel's end we care and need to know that they will come out the other side. A compelling and well written story.

The concept is sound - a single farm with rain in the midst of a drought, and a murder surrounded by religious zealots, angry neighbors, travelers and a marriage on the brink - but it never really went anywhere. The characters were all so sparsely drawn I couldn't get a bead on anyone. The prose was lovely but the story plodded to the point of tedium. It was a decidedly unengaging book, and took all of my effort to finish. In the end I really didn't care.

OK so the first 3rd of the book was a plodding and bleak description of sexism in a stoic North Dakota Protestant family in the 50s. The middle of the book was an interesting and entertaining story of a young girl chaffing against those restraints, questioning societal norms and forging her own way. The final portion was a crazy Nancy Drew mystery wrap-up that I felt went way overboard in the outlandish plot twist department. After the first 100 pages - it was engaging, but the end cheapened the coming of age story.

I am not a huge fan of this particular genre. That being said- I can enjoy and devour any story with engaging characters, vivid locations, and an intriguing plot. Sadly this story not only slogged through the 500 plus pages, it was bogged down by an over large cast of characters so sketchily presented it was difficult to keep track let alone care about them. There were multiple subplots so abruptly started and stopped as to be confusing and beg the question - "why are we being told this?" I made it through but it was rough and occasionally tedious. I was left feeling a book this long shouldn't have been so vague. The few plot twists that were interesting were never fully realized and as such unable to make up for the plodding pace of the narratives.

I read The Deepest Secret voraciously. Buckley knows how to draw characters who feel authentic. They are flawed human beings who remain sympathetic. The Cul-de-sac becomes a microcosm of society and a mirror that reminds us how very little we know about the inner lives of our friends and neighbors. A mother is forced to choose between what is morally right and what is best for her child. The fallout from her decision is a gripping narrative of the price that love exacts from all of us, and the compromises we must make. I have read Buckley's other 2 books and with this - her 3rd novel - I am a fan.

This was a fast, unobjectionable read. I like stories that have multiple points of view - with distinct voices for each of the main characters - and I felt that this was handled nicely, but the human protagonists remained rather flat to me. I didn't actually feel terribly engaged with any of them, and the dog was a bit too anthropomorphised for my taste. For the dept of the subject matter - marriage, war, loneliness and unrealized dreams - it felt a little over simplified. It merely skimmed the surface of these characters without providing a whole lot of insight. A good book, but not a great one for me.

I can't decide if this is a novel disguised as character studies or a series of point of view short stories. Either way I devoured this on the plane.

Multiple members of a large Southern Family share a part of their backgrounds and lives, and somehow these disparate pieces make up a whole novel, that is engaging, heartbreaking, hilarious and caustic. A sharp look at how generations view family obligation and tradition that transcends Southern culture. You may not like everyone in this family, but you will recognize them.

I have not read other books by Wilton Barnhardt, but I will be seeking them out.

I was an English major. I like slice of life fiction that meanders with no discernible beginning or ending. I consider not finishing a book a personal failure. This book was almost my Waterloo. The description intrigued me, but the actual book was an abject let down. The characters were unformed, and the plot so tedious that standstill would be an overstatement. How does one take a child's abduction, return and move to Cost Rica, and make it so mind-numbingly boring? On a 10 hour bus ride from Kansas City to Dallas with my daughter's team I chose staring out the window into the darkness at what I assume was rural Oklahoma over reading this book.

It kept me too much at arms length. While the author did a great job of interesting me in Lily, her past, and her new family in Canada, I was left feeling distinctly unsatisfied by the answers I received. The characters were interesting, but not as vivid or textured as I had hoped. Perhaps it was a plot device to make us feel as disconnected from Lily as Julia, her abandoned child, was. A story told in alternating timelines about a mysterious young WWII Jewish refugee, her appropriation of dead woman's identity to escape to the safety of Canada to start over, and the daughter and husband she left behind when she could not bear to live out her lie could have been dense & rich. It read more like a cream puff to me. Nice, but not very filling.

This book came to me as I was plodding through a tedious library book. How great to go from barely-getting-through-it to a book that I almost couldn't put down! Not only does Shapiro offer us a glimpse into the world struggling artists, but we get a fascinating look at the techniques and skills of high end art forgers.

With a protagonist I genuinely liked, enough plot twists to keep me turning pages, and a reality-based framework, this book was hugely enjoyable to read. hapiro kept me entertained and intrigued from page one. I have already given it to my husband to read, and will highly recommend it to others. On a side note - I am now looking at paintings in galleries and museums in a completely different light. The wet on wet technique of modern artists vs. the wet on dry of previous generations; the luminescent quality of oils - I will never look at a Degas the same way again!

An engaging train wreck. This book is gray and cold, and keeps the readers oddly at a distance while drawing us into one family’s crisis as casual observers. The dialog driven story piques and holds your interest as the household implodes, and our characters are cast adrift within the author’s very tight framework of time and location. It feels like a play - a “slice of life” character study of people and the fine filaments that hold us together as families. Taking place over just a few days, we feel the disquiet that grips a would-be step mother and her inability to take charge of a family as it unravels. The characters are raw, and not necessarily pretty. The author gives us enough information to satisfy, while keeping us wondering what will happen to them.

As I grow older I become increasingly less tolerant of self centered characters making “rookie mistakes”. So I have to say that while I liked Outside Wonderland - I did not particularly like any of the Stenen children, and felt their woe-is-me attitudes that offered them the mutual “out” for self absorbed, lousy decision-making, made for insipid and uninteresting protagonists. That said, I didn’t dislike the book, in fact I found it to be a fast and generally entertaining read. I much preferred the interaction in the afterlife between the Stenen parents and felt their relationship was much more real and potentially interesting than those of their offspring. I also felt the prose in the “Here” (afterlife) sections was vastly superior to that in the “There” or real life moments. I liked Outside Wonderland fine as written; I would have loved it had all been written like those incandescent glimpses of “Here” were.