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2.71 AVERAGE
2.71 AVERAGE
challenging
dark
emotional
mysterious
reflective
sad
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Mediocre. Not nearly as interesting or fleshed out as much of Mcguire's other books.
Good read for a plane, nailed it in one sitting. I really had no idea what the hell was going on for a while. A little Murakami'ish, but not nearly at his level of writing.
I truly felt lost while reading Lost by Gregory Maguire. This is the second book I've read by this author so I can say that I really don't care for his style of writing. Unfortunately, I have all his other books to read. Critics call his prose "rich" and maybe it is that but I find it confusing to point of sheer frustration sometimes.
There is a thoroughly unlikeable (to me anyway) "heroine" named Winifred Rudge. She writes children's books but would like to write one for adults with a heroine named Wendy Pritzke. She's become blocked and unable to write. She thinks if she goes to the old family homestead in Hampstead, Great Britain she'll be able to get a jump start. The family originally owned the whole house but it's since been turned into "flats" and sold off to other people. Only Winnie's cousin John still owns the top floor flat and she plans to stay with him.
This is good so far, I can understand it. The first mystery comes right in the beginning of the book when she attends a meeting for parents who want to adopt internationally. She says she is writing a book about that topic but later we learn she is lying. So why was she there? I like little mysteries like that. What I didn't like was the conversations between Winnie and the other characters. I felt like I was trying to follow a maze and that feeling continued throughout the book with her interactions with all the other characters.
When she arrives in England, she finds another mystery: her cousin has disappeared. Where did he go? Was he kidnapped, murdered? Is he in hiding? And what is that knocking noise behind the wall? There are repairmen there to do renovations in the flat but they are afraid of the knocking. Winnie takes it upon herself to go visiting all the neighbors to see if she can figure out if it's a ghost, a trapped cat or just what.
At first Winnie's behavior seems okay if a little odd. As she is running around offending the neighbors and trying to find her cousin or the ghost or the cat or whatever, she is imagining scenes in her mind from her adult book. Some of the questions begin to be answered about what is really going on. As they're answered, she's becoming weirder and weirder.
I was so ready for the book to end. I'm not even sure what really happened to Winnie during those last couple of chapters.
Reviewers say that the book is about loss and being lost. Yes, it is definitely that. If you like Gregory Maguire and you haven't read the book, go for it. Otherwise, it's not on my recommend-to-friends list.
There is a thoroughly unlikeable (to me anyway) "heroine" named Winifred Rudge. She writes children's books but would like to write one for adults with a heroine named Wendy Pritzke. She's become blocked and unable to write. She thinks if she goes to the old family homestead in Hampstead, Great Britain she'll be able to get a jump start. The family originally owned the whole house but it's since been turned into "flats" and sold off to other people. Only Winnie's cousin John still owns the top floor flat and she plans to stay with him.
This is good so far, I can understand it. The first mystery comes right in the beginning of the book when she attends a meeting for parents who want to adopt internationally. She says she is writing a book about that topic but later we learn she is lying. So why was she there? I like little mysteries like that. What I didn't like was the conversations between Winnie and the other characters. I felt like I was trying to follow a maze and that feeling continued throughout the book with her interactions with all the other characters.
When she arrives in England, she finds another mystery: her cousin has disappeared. Where did he go? Was he kidnapped, murdered? Is he in hiding? And what is that knocking noise behind the wall? There are repairmen there to do renovations in the flat but they are afraid of the knocking. Winnie takes it upon herself to go visiting all the neighbors to see if she can figure out if it's a ghost, a trapped cat or just what.
At first Winnie's behavior seems okay if a little odd. As she is running around offending the neighbors and trying to find her cousin or the ghost or the cat or whatever, she is imagining scenes in her mind from her adult book. Some of the questions begin to be answered about what is really going on. As they're answered, she's becoming weirder and weirder.
I was so ready for the book to end. I'm not even sure what really happened to Winnie during those last couple of chapters.
Reviewers say that the book is about loss and being lost. Yes, it is definitely that. If you like Gregory Maguire and you haven't read the book, go for it. Otherwise, it's not on my recommend-to-friends list.
I can't say how disappointed I was in this book because there are no words to describe it clearly enough. I was a huge fan of his two books. I picked this up and put it down years ago because it wasn't good. Desperate to read something, I picked it up again to give it another go. My initial impression was the correct one. This story was all over the place, not really filled in, in terms of the character's personalities or motivations. It was somewhat disjointed and quite honestly, I could have cared less about what happened to any of the characters. Part of me wants to write a letter to Mr. Maguire to tell him how bad this book was in light of his other, completely creative, tries at fiction.
I went into this story not expecting much, as it was gifted to me by a swap partner and I wasn't super fond of the blurb on the back. I've got to say...it did *not* deliver. I didn't hate it, per se, but it just made no sense. It wasn't good. It wasn't fully thought out. Or perhaps too thought out that all of the ideas were so underlying that it was incomprehensible. I'm all out there for far fetched stories, as I enjoy putting my own take and twist on why events might've happened, but this book had none of that inspiration. It was instead, confusing, had an extreme amount of plot holes, & just downright disappointing.
The protagonist was not a likable character, and that was on purpose, given that she was a grieving woman. Or, at least, I interpreted it to be on purpose. But perhaps it was not, again, I was a little lost. I wasn't super interested in her, which made the the story hard to digest, since she was the main focus. The beginning was incredibly boring and slow, for at least the first 100 pages I couldn't get into it at all. Winnie was a pathological liar throughout the entire book so you could only tell truth from fiction less than half of the time, which always left you confused if you didn't know the facts about the situation from a prior interaction.
The author also had a very strange writing style. Again, it felt too detailed at times and left me confused. It seemed like he put 7 extra words per sentence that didn't need to be there, or expanded on things that felt like they didn't quite matter all that much. It left me bored and annoyed. However, I think it did add a compelling tone at times that was the thing that kept me reading when I wanted to quit this book.
All of the characters in this story just felt so strange to me. It's as if they weren't quite supposed to be there, or were there too much. Or it didn't make sense how their relationship formed so quickly or ended so abruptly. I'm unconvinced that these relationships would've existed in real life, especially with which the quality of the interactions withheld between the characters and the depth of the interactions. It just didn't quite fit.
The whole John and Winnie thing was gross to me. She described him many times as a "brother," and "cousin," in which he was her cousin. However, then went on to say that she loved him like a lover and that they'd had sex multiple times. The relationship and sexual innuendos between them make me disgusted, considering they're related. This story took place in the late 90's or early 2000's, so this wasn't an "olden time," thing where it was normal to elope with your cousins. It was just incest, and so unnecessary to the story. I hated that.
I also didn't like the little blurbs of Wendy's novel that were included in this story. I know Winnie's whole journey to Europe was to write this story, but it just felt so forced and fake, considering that the author was just giving us more information about the life of Winnie in a strange roundabout way. Again, it just felt wrong. Everything about this story felt weird. It was supposed to be this "surprise," at the end that the story was about her life and gave us more secrets of her past, but it was so obvious, given that John's name hadn't been changed. It was a cool concept, but executed very poorly.
Overall, I wouldn't recommend this book to anyone, and will be donating my copy to a little free library, where hopefully someone will enjoy it more than me !
The protagonist was not a likable character, and that was on purpose, given that she was a grieving woman. Or, at least, I interpreted it to be on purpose. But perhaps it was not, again, I was a little lost. I wasn't super interested in her, which made the the story hard to digest, since she was the main focus. The beginning was incredibly boring and slow, for at least the first 100 pages I couldn't get into it at all. Winnie was a pathological liar throughout the entire book so you could only tell truth from fiction less than half of the time, which always left you confused if you didn't know the facts about the situation from a prior interaction.
The author also had a very strange writing style. Again, it felt too detailed at times and left me confused. It seemed like he put 7 extra words per sentence that didn't need to be there, or expanded on things that felt like they didn't quite matter all that much. It left me bored and annoyed. However, I think it did add a compelling tone at times that was the thing that kept me reading when I wanted to quit this book.
All of the characters in this story just felt so strange to me. It's as if they weren't quite supposed to be there, or were there too much. Or it didn't make sense how their relationship formed so quickly or ended so abruptly. I'm unconvinced that these relationships would've existed in real life, especially with which the quality of the interactions withheld between the characters and the depth of the interactions. It just didn't quite fit.
The whole John and Winnie thing was gross to me. She described him many times as a "brother," and "cousin," in which he was her cousin. However, then went on to say that she loved him like a lover and that they'd had sex multiple times. The relationship and sexual innuendos between them make me disgusted, considering they're related. This story took place in the late 90's or early 2000's, so this wasn't an "olden time," thing where it was normal to elope with your cousins. It was just incest, and so unnecessary to the story. I hated that.
I also didn't like the little blurbs of Wendy's novel that were included in this story. I know Winnie's whole journey to Europe was to write this story, but it just felt so forced and fake, considering that the author was just giving us more information about the life of Winnie in a strange roundabout way. Again, it just felt wrong. Everything about this story felt weird. It was supposed to be this "surprise," at the end that the story was about her life and gave us more secrets of her past, but it was so obvious, given that John's name hadn't been changed. It was a cool concept, but executed very poorly.
Overall, I wouldn't recommend this book to anyone, and will be donating my copy to a little free library, where hopefully someone will enjoy it more than me !
This book was hard to follow, and nothing about it made me feel interested in or empathetic towards the character of Winnie.
This is my second Gregory Maguire book to read, and I was sorely disappointed. First of all, the book appears to be about Scrooge, and based on Maguire's previous books, you might think it is the story of A Christmas Story from Scrooge's point of view. Wrong. The book only makes references to this story, and those few references seem to be merely so Maguire can somehow hold on to the reputation he has garnered from his previous stories. My biggest complaint about the book is that Maguire takes you to some many places (geographically, emotionally, conceptually) and leaves you there with no conclusion (or a pitiful excuse for a conclusion). At the end of the novel, my big question was simply what's the point?
IMHO it's cheating to add this to my "read" books, as I didn't finish it.
As I've said elsewhere, once I'm into a book I almost never put it down. It's like a personal challenge or something. Occasionally when I'm really, really struggling, limping through a book, resentful of every page, a good friend of mine will say, "it's OK to put it down unfinished." (Yeah, it's weird to need permission to stop reading part-way through, but that's me.) This is one where I regret every moment I wasted trying to read it, hoping at some point I'd get enthusiastic about it.
I'm not even sure what it was I disliked - it just seemed to ramble on and never get to the point. And since I love fantasy, which tends to meander somewhat anyway, you know it had to be bad for me to give up on it. I would also like to point out that I have never read any of Maguire's other books, so I'm not one who loved Wicked, for instance, and wanted Lost to be "another one, just like that." This just really didn't do it for me.
As I've said elsewhere, once I'm into a book I almost never put it down. It's like a personal challenge or something. Occasionally when I'm really, really struggling, limping through a book, resentful of every page, a good friend of mine will say, "it's OK to put it down unfinished." (Yeah, it's weird to need permission to stop reading part-way through, but that's me.) This is one where I regret every moment I wasted trying to read it, hoping at some point I'd get enthusiastic about it.
I'm not even sure what it was I disliked - it just seemed to ramble on and never get to the point. And since I love fantasy, which tends to meander somewhat anyway, you know it had to be bad for me to give up on it. I would also like to point out that I have never read any of Maguire's other books, so I'm not one who loved Wicked, for instance, and wanted Lost to be "another one, just like that." This just really didn't do it for me.
I think that other than Wicked this is the best book that Gregory Maguire has written. It has a creative plot line, it is touching and well written.