What do readers think of Arcadia by Lauren Groff? Write your own review.

I highly enjoyed Arcadia, once I adjusted to the style in which it was written. At first, the use of the present tense made me feel disconnected from the story, but soon I was sucked in and felt that Dicken's Ghost of the Christmas Past had taken me on ride to view the commune and I felt like I was really there, feeling their hope and anticipation for a better future. I also enjoyed the hints at the Utopian ideals and communities of the 19th century, which most people seem to have forgotten.

Bit's integration into mainstream society was interesting, and a part of the book that I would have liked to know more about. I thought the ending dragged on longer than it needed to be and I had trouble getting through that part.

At the end this book gave me a lot to think about and says quite a bit about modern society. In today's world people have a great deal of freedom, but they have lost the sense of community they once had. I liked the way that Groff had the Amish helping the commune, even though on the surface the Amish were so different, in some ways they had the same objective in the long run.

This is the first book by Lauren Groff that I have read and I will make of point of reading her other works. The story of a 70's commune rang very true to me. She has an assortment of characters and her follow through with all of their stories was well done for the most part. The story is told with vivid, almost poetic descriptions and kept my interest throughout.

"Arcadia" was a bit of a disappointment after "The Monsters of Templeton". It started off very slowly but is well written and the characters very well developed. It definitely "grew on me" and I would recommend it.

The author used words that opened the mind into creating the location of the story and its characters. Also, brought vividly alive were the conditions of the people and the surrounding areas. The author evolved the story from rebellion to romance. Very believable. Living the words in the book brought back many incidents transpiring across the United States during the time covered.

The romance brought into the novel was ever present and captivating. Very believable. I thoroughly enjoyed the read.

As a contemporary fairy tale, "Arcadia" is beautifully written, imaginative, and thought-provoking. I enjoyed the character of Bit, who is portrayed as an idealistic old soul, and I appreciated his efforts to find comfort and peace in a tragic world that is deeply flawed and at times heartbreaking. Although there were parts of this slow-paced novel that seemed over-ambitious and perhaps somewhat contrived, it is a lovely book overall and I would definitely recommend it.

Having LOVED "The Monsters of Templeton" by Lauren Groff, I was anxious to dive into "Arcadia". I was, unfortunately, underwhelmed. I found the story and characters rather flat and uninteresting. Disappointing....

I truly loved Laura Groff's Monsters of Templeton, and had hoped that I would have loved Arcadia just as much. I have to say that I found this book really hard to get into. I was really intrigued by the premise, a 1960s hippie commune aiming to build a utopian community, but I found the story to be rather slow and it just did not capture my attention.

The only character I felt any connection to was Bit. Perhaps that was intentional, but the other characters ran together for me. Also, the different sections were so disconnected, with no real sense of how the characters got from point A to point B to point C. Again, this might be intentional, given this line: "What they found moving, they told him later, were the blanks between the frames, the leaps that happened invisibly between the then and the now." (This refers to portraits in an art exhibit.) I just couldn't get past the fact that I wanted to know more about what was in those blanks.