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4.06 AVERAGE
4.06 AVERAGE
Amor Towles is a master of taking on a style of writing of the genre he has adopted. Gentleman in Moscow smacks of Russian novel… Lincoln Highway feels like a Steinbeck meets Hemingway meets Faulkner if any of these men had a sense of humor… the Rules of Civility took me in right away and Amor Towles narrative had me looking forward to understanding how multi layered and interesting people can be… full of 3 dimensional and complex characters everything is more complicated that good and bad or right and wrong… at the end of the day this book left me with a feeling that I wish The Great Gatsby had accomplished the same tour de force.
3.5 stars. Amazing writing. Not my favorite era.
Loved this one. Perfect ending, incredible writing - witty, emotional, full of gossip, love, and wild parties - what more can you want in a book?
Brilliant, witty, and sassy. I couldn't get enough of his writing, or his narrator. I want to start talking like her--I wish I had a quick quip for every possible scenario! It was also interesting to compare the time period of this novel (immediately after the Great Depression but right before WWII hit the US) to the one we're going through now--the scrambling to make appearances even when everything has been lost. Fabulous novel, I can't wait til he writes another full-length one.
Loved the language, didn’t love the overall story. I see the influence of Gatsby for sure (even using the structure of a year to tell the story as Fitzgerald used a summer) but there were a LOT of scenes of restaurants and clubs that helped to establish setting but didn’t add TOO much to the storyline. I wonder if the book could have been about 50 pages shorter. With that said, the setting was immersive and maybe the book needed these scenes to make it so.
This isn’t a dealbreaker for me, but I didn’t like Katey. Thinking of her as an unreliable narrator a la Nick Carraway helped a bit but some of her actions and reactions felt like a stretch. Her background was a little too mysterious; I wanted to have a bit more revealed. I thought it was a little odd that people would ask questions about her background and then accept her half-answers. But maybe that’s just how it is for some people?
Just a note for myself that I read this book during the covid19 pandemic and I wanted to escape from our current time and place; this book definitely did that. Slow pace of reading due to two young kids at home.
This isn’t a dealbreaker for me, but I didn’t like Katey. Thinking of her as an unreliable narrator a la Nick Carraway helped a bit but some of her actions and reactions felt like a stretch. Her background was a little too mysterious; I wanted to have a bit more revealed. I thought it was a little odd that people would ask questions about her background and then accept her half-answers. But maybe that’s just how it is for some people?
Just a note for myself that I read this book during the covid19 pandemic and I wanted to escape from our current time and place; this book definitely did that. Slow pace of reading due to two young kids at home.
hopeful
informative
reflective
sad
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
4.5 stars. Not quite A Gentleman in Moscow, but still transports you to another time and place.
I appreciated that many of the typical clichés were avoided, but I nearly didn’t stick around long enough to find that out because this went almost nowhere for so long.