Reviews - Stella Maris | The StoryGraph

958 reviews for:

Stella Maris

Cormac McCarthy

3.87 AVERAGE

icyirisreads's review against another edition

3.0

challenging dark emotional informative reflective slow-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: No

Loveable characters: No

Diverse cast of characters: No

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

Very interesting book. It was very cool in many ways, and very annoying and unsatisfying in other way. I enjoyed that the audiobook employed two different readers for the patient and the doctor. Their sessions felt very real! I enjoyed her mathematical rants because I learned something! I believe the thesis of the book was the idea of what’s “real” is different in each of our minds, from the mind of a theoretical mathematician and a schizophrenic patient. That being said no questions were ever answered and it felt like a slog to get through!

lliz4rd's review against another edition

3.5

challenging emotional mysterious reflective slow-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: No

Loveable characters: No

Diverse cast of characters: No

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

I’m guessing the inside of McCarthy’s head looks kind of like this book. I like the long ramblings, however some were too hard for me to understand, particularly the complex mathematics, the idea of that whole world was fascinating to me but I had to skip through a couple of lines of hard dialogue.

Speaking of dialogue, I love the format of the whole book being a conversation between the psych and the patient, Alicia Western (the sister of Bobby Western in The Passenger) The female character was actually written really well, in the sense she was written like all the male characters McCarthy had ever written, but with female pronouns. The doctor hitting on his patient and commenting on her body were a bit gross to me, but then it’s set in the 70s, you’d hope that would be left out of a modern setting.

All in all, it was more enjoyable to me than the Passenger, I loved knowing the other side of the story, while having some things left unsaid. But it’s a read requiring brain power, and possibly better after a second go around.

finneganswake's review against another edition

4.0

thought-provoking and ultimately crushing. I read this before the passenger (long story) so I'm sure there's a load of context I'm missing out on but I found it to be a fantastic character study. amazing that McCarthy had that sauce right until his final novel

sarabeagle's review against another edition

2.0

I have mixed feelings about both this book and The Passenger. McCarthy is a hell of a writer, there is no doubt about that. There were phrases in both books that made you stop an appreciate his skill. But I feel like I did when I read Moby Dick - I loved the story, but got bored with the random chapters and passages about math and science (or in the case of Moby Dick, whale anatomy and boat structure). You have two characters who are geniuses and they go on about genius stuff, but if I wanted to read extensively about math and physics, I'd pick up a book on those topics. I appreciate McCarthy's curiosity, but I really related to the psychiatrist in Stella Maris. He frequently responded to Alicia's musings with "You lost me" or "I don't follow". Yeah dude, you and me both.