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A review by bookysue
Here I Am by Jonathan Safran Foer
1.0
It kills me to give JSF one star because I've always called him one of my favorite authors. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is maybe my all-time favorite book. And when I heard he had a new novel out after all this time, I couldn't WAIT to read it. But maybe the anticipation was my undoing because I just do not like this book. At all. I started reading it months ago and put it down one day and never picked it up again, which should have signaled something to me, but finally I convinced myself to try it again a few days ago. I made it to pg 178, and it's official; I'm calling it quits.
I just feel like instead of the thoughtful, beautiful writing I used to love him for, he filled this book was the sort of cheap tricks that bad writers use to try to elicit emotion from the reader -- in this case, all the stuff about innocent dogs on electrified floors and the diminishing quality of life of the old family dog, etc. Ugh.
I also could never lose myself in the story because it felt so much like navel-gazing to me. Everything he wrote seemed like a slight variation of his real life, his real family, his real job...It just felt like laziness to me, which I'm sure is unfair, but there it is.
To be clear, I haven't even made it to the real story; I've just struggled so damn much with the initial character development, and I care so little about what's going to happen that I have to move on to something else.
Basically, I never in a million years thought I'd be giving up on a JSF book, but...here I am.
I just feel like instead of the thoughtful, beautiful writing I used to love him for, he filled this book was the sort of cheap tricks that bad writers use to try to elicit emotion from the reader -- in this case, all the stuff about innocent dogs on electrified floors and the diminishing quality of life of the old family dog, etc. Ugh.
I also could never lose myself in the story because it felt so much like navel-gazing to me. Everything he wrote seemed like a slight variation of his real life, his real family, his real job...It just felt like laziness to me, which I'm sure is unfair, but there it is.
To be clear, I haven't even made it to the real story; I've just struggled so damn much with the initial character development, and I care so little about what's going to happen that I have to move on to something else.
Basically, I never in a million years thought I'd be giving up on a JSF book, but...here I am.