Reviews - The Lincoln Highway

6.12k reviews for:

The Lincoln Highway

Amor Towles

4.13 AVERAGE

sisbill's review against another edition

4.5

adventurous emotional funny reflective sad medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: Yes

Audible/pleasure

eleni_flores's review against another edition

5.0

Amor Towles is one of the few authors who can write an almost-600-page book that leaves you wanting even more. After not loving his debut novel and being only medium on [b:A Gentleman in Moscow|34066798|A Gentleman in Moscow|Amor Towles|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1551480896l/34066798._SY75_.jpg|45743836], I didn't have high expectations for The Lincoln Highway, but I fell in love with all of these characters and devoured this story with equal parts anxiety and utter enjoyment.

Towles is an absolute genius of both the written word and storytelling. And while I respected his ability to do both in A Gentleman in Moscow, this story was much more up my alley. I love how he leaves just enough ambiguity in some places to leave you wondering, but to know it was absolutely intentional on his part. And Billy! Sweet, precocious Billy. I basically hugged this book the second I finished it, sad for it to be over, but so much happier for having read it.

kscearcelevie's review against another edition

5.0

Towards the end of The Lincoln Highway, the character Duchess tells us a bit about vaudeville: “The members of the audience entered the theater with their own preferences, their own prejudices, their own sets of expectations. So, without the audience members realizing it, the performer needed to remove those and replace them with a new set of expectations that he was in a better position to anticipate, manipulate, and ultimately satisfy.” Towles presents us with a 576-page novel titled “The Lincoln Highway,” a map of the titular transcontinental road right at the beginning, and a set of characters who determine in the opening chapters to drive along that highway from Nebraska to San Francisco. But rather than the epic road trip the reader might reasonably expect, Towles delivers something else entirely: a nested set of stories about the detours life forces us to take, and the way unrealized expectations and ambitions can still satisfy.

lanabug711's review against another edition

5.0

4.5 stars rounded up to 5. A Gentleman in Moscow was a home run for me, but Rules of Civility was somewhat of a miss. So I wasn't quite sure how I'd feel about Amor Towles' latest book. While not quite a home run, this was an excellent read. While there is a large cast of characters, none of them seem like secondary characters. All of them are vivid and have very human foibles that make them even more real and relatable. Woolly especially hit a soft spot in my heart, while I admired the maturity that teenage Emmett displayed. I also liked the nod to Rules of Civility that was linked through Woolly.

Overall, this is a journey story. Like the stories in Billy's book, each of the main characters are on his or her own journey. For some of the characters, it's a physical journey, while for others, it's a journey of emotional growth. The Lincoln Highway is just a pretext for the journeys that each of them take.