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sbright421 's review for:
The Candy House
by Jennifer Egan
challenging
mysterious
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
This book felt like that It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia meme where Charlie is standing in front of the cork board with a bunch of papers pinned up with strings in between them. There are so many characters that are introduced and have their plots resolved for a 320 page long book, and their interconnections revealed, that it towards the end it makes it really difficult to piece it all together. The only reason I was able to breeze through this so quickly is because I had a ton of time on planes to read this. Were I to go back and read this again, I would probably want to read it in smaller chunks and with a group of people. There's simply so much to digest, both with the character/plot development and with the commentary Egan has about a world adopting and evolving with an ever increasing privately-run surveillance state, that to have someone else to theorize with might've made this an even richer experience. I do think, though, that the experience is almost too rich. It just doesn't really feel like Egan stuck the landing here. There were too many different characters with too many connections for me to feel like the plot had resolved itself. To end with a narrative about the family it did just didn't do it for me.
The writing in the book is really impressive. It reminded me a lot of Faulkner's "The Sound and the Fury", which is in my personal "Top 5 Books of All Time" because there are times where the narration style switches to portray who is speaking to the reader. One of the many chapters is written from a teenage girl's perspective and another from a government spy's perspective, and another was written by someone who is labeled in Egan's constructed society as a "counter". There were times where I thought it wasn't done perfectly, where I was thinking about how difficult it must be to write from the perspective of someone who has a different occupation or demographic background as you, but it was still something I did not expect in reading the book and had me excited to keep reading to see how else the narrative style would change.
The building up of the characters through the beginning and middle and even near the ending of the book made me feel like I was reading something really special. There were multiple moments where I had a "eureka moment" realizing how characters were connected, but the ending felt unresolved and I had to take off a half star because of that.
The writing in the book is really impressive. It reminded me a lot of Faulkner's "The Sound and the Fury", which is in my personal "Top 5 Books of All Time" because there are times where the narration style switches to portray who is speaking to the reader. One of the many chapters is written from a teenage girl's perspective and another from a government spy's perspective, and another was written by someone who is labeled in Egan's constructed society as a "counter". There were times where I thought it wasn't done perfectly, where I was thinking about how difficult it must be to write from the perspective of someone who has a different occupation or demographic background as you, but it was still something I did not expect in reading the book and had me excited to keep reading to see how else the narrative style would change.
The building up of the characters through the beginning and middle and even near the ending of the book made me feel like I was reading something really special. There were multiple moments where I had a "eureka moment" realizing how characters were connected, but the ending felt unresolved and I had to take off a half star because of that.