svmreads's Reviews (412)

Loved the first 100 pages of this book, but it got to be tedious after a while. There were some really sharp observations and zingers but admittedly I had to skim the second half because I got bored.

If I kept going with this it was gonna put me in a reading slump in the worst way. Incredibly slow and overly descriptive.

I feel bamboozled. I was expecting to love this and it was so boring! I read many books where not much happens but at least in those there is some element I enjoy about it. In this, I found nothing that compelled me to keep going.

“We’d drink cloudy homemade wine and scream loud enough to get through to the core of life, believing that there was less in between us and heaven since we were on a roof. Today, several decades later, separated from that time by a new millennium and a new kind of world, I can still understand that scream, perhaps more so than ever, that yearning for closeness and getting to the heart of it all.”

This was fine. Not sure why it was longlisted for the National Book Award. I came into this expecting for it to mainly concentrate on Kathleen and her eight hours in the pool but instead we got a meandering back and forth between Virgil and Kathleen's flashbacks. The ending was interesting but not sure it was worth it.