A review by geoffdgeorge
The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon

As a detective novel it's a fun read, and Chabon's definitely got talent, but I did find myself drifting a bit towards the end. I went to a talk where the author read from the book, and I liked the segment he read aloud, and he talked about how he spent three years working on the thing, and it sounded very arduous and made it difficult for me to not like, just because I knew what went into it. I'm wondering how much I would have liked it if I'd never heard him talk about it.

I spent a good deal of time looking up yiddish words in the OED and eventually using a Yiddish-English dictionary, which really is probably a good thing.

I imagine you would like it a great deal if you're big on detective fiction. And the world of Sitka, Alaska that Chabon created ... you could visualize it so well sometimes, this great big city with grimy old buildings, constant bad weather, and a sun that barely rises before falling again. So many diners and hotels and sections of town. You could tell that he had put a lot into the creation of that world even before setting a story within it, and there are probably still portions of it that only he will ever know about.

Overall, I give it a "yeah, pretty good" on a scale of "piss awful" to "intelligent, fantastic, and amazing."