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queenerdloser 's review for:
A Visit from the Goon Squad
by Jennifer Egan
There's been so many times I've wished that Goodreads allowed a half-star review. My more accurate review for this book is 4.5 stars.
All in all, this is an excellent book. It's marketed as a novel, but it really works more as a group of linked short stories, examining people who have touched the lives of the book's protagonists (Bennie and Sasha, listed in the summary blurb). Despite that, it covers a wide range of times and places, spanning from the early 1980s to the future in 2021. All of the characters are complex, engaging, and full-bodied; while there were some I liked and some I hated, all of them felt very real. What really sells this collection for me is the tightness of the interconnected short stories; tiny details would transfer from one story to the next, charged objects would appear in multiple stories, characters would drift in and out of each story, and ideas would transfer over. All of this cross-over allowed for a tightly woven piece of fiction, and made all of the ideas and objects that transferred throughout that much more meaningful and charged. Additionally, Egan experiments (successfully) with story form throughout, which was fun and interesting to read.
My .5 take-off is for the final story, which was the only one that I didn't enjoy. Set in 2021, it's a futuristic look at where the characters we've spent the book getting to know will end up. It's the only one of the stories that felt preachy, almost condescending, and the one time that I felt like Egan's overlying theme ("Time's a goon.") fell flat instead of hitting its mark. It was made almost worse by the fact that I very much enjoyed the book up until this point; a flat ending after such great work felt like a slap in the face.
Despite that, I would still highly recommend the book - even if, like me, you don't enjoy the final story, the rest is still very much worth reading.
All in all, this is an excellent book. It's marketed as a novel, but it really works more as a group of linked short stories, examining people who have touched the lives of the book's protagonists (Bennie and Sasha, listed in the summary blurb). Despite that, it covers a wide range of times and places, spanning from the early 1980s to the future in 2021. All of the characters are complex, engaging, and full-bodied; while there were some I liked and some I hated, all of them felt very real. What really sells this collection for me is the tightness of the interconnected short stories; tiny details would transfer from one story to the next, charged objects would appear in multiple stories, characters would drift in and out of each story, and ideas would transfer over. All of this cross-over allowed for a tightly woven piece of fiction, and made all of the ideas and objects that transferred throughout that much more meaningful and charged. Additionally, Egan experiments (successfully) with story form throughout, which was fun and interesting to read.
My .5 take-off is for the final story, which was the only one that I didn't enjoy. Set in 2021, it's a futuristic look at where the characters we've spent the book getting to know will end up. It's the only one of the stories that felt preachy, almost condescending, and the one time that I felt like Egan's overlying theme ("Time's a goon.") fell flat instead of hitting its mark. It was made almost worse by the fact that I very much enjoyed the book up until this point; a flat ending after such great work felt like a slap in the face.
Despite that, I would still highly recommend the book - even if, like me, you don't enjoy the final story, the rest is still very much worth reading.