Looking at the previous GoodReads reviews of THE FEAST OF LOVE, this book is a lot like Scorpios: readers either adored it absolutely or disliked it absolutely. After reading it myself, I think I know why.

This book is incredibly uneven. Some sections were brilliant, others were eye rolling. On the one hand, THE FEAST OF LOVE is yet another author pulling a Vonnegut and inserting himself in the story, and for Baxter, it takes long while for this literary move to feel genuine. The descriptions of different settings were wearisome and tedious. I liked that the lesbian storyline was present, but it was cliche. There are some logical plot holes too, like why, if all the characters are telling Baxter their stories in flashback, do their voices and prose style change over the course of the novel? Would the police force AND an expensive private investigator really not be able to find one man bumming it in Hollywood? If all the other neighbors' lives are so closely knit, why haven't Baxter and his partner appeared? Baxter also took a lot of page space to justify the end of the young lovers' storyline, but it still came out as forcibly tragic. I could see Baxter's little typing fingers, making it so.

On the other hand, I cried. I cried a lot. I liked the characters; I felt for them; I felt scared for them. The chapters focused on the older Jewish couple I read through with trepidation and fear. I loved the way the POVs interacted: how they clashed, how they picked up the same things, how they traced the same motif. I'm a huge sucker for dragons, and this book had a dragon. I loved and was saddened by how the young people were dealing with the same things I'm dealing with, even though thirty years separate us.

So, in conclusion: this book is complicated. Sometimes it's awesome; sometimes my eyeballs roll out the door and down the street. If you'd like to pick it up, approach the experience with patience and tissues.