About this title: Danielle, a junior television producer, is on the hunt for the documentary idea that will make her reputation; Marina, the beautiful daughter of a famous and wealthy liberal journalist and intellectual, is desperate to prove her worth - while unsure exactly of how this is to be achieved; Julius, a freelance writer of devastating book reviews, is ...
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Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
Date Published: 08/2006
ISBN-13:9780307264190ISBN:030726419X
Description: Very good in very good dust jacket. Very Good, In very good dust jacket. Glued binding. Paper over boards. With dust jacket. 431 p. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
Date Published: 08/2006
ISBN-13:9780307264190ISBN:030726419X
Description: Very good in very good dust jacket. Very Good, In very good dust jacket. Glued binding. Paper over boards. With dust jacket. 431 p. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
Date Published: 08/2006
ISBN-13:9780307264190ISBN:030726419X
Description: Very good in very good dust jacket. Very Good, In very good dust jacket. Glued binding. Paper over boards. With dust jacket. 431 p. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
Date Published: 08/2006
ISBN-13:9780307264190ISBN:030726419X
Description: Very good in very good dust jacket. Very Good, In very good dust jacket. Glued binding. Paper over boards. With dust jacket. 431 p. Ex-Library expected imperfections. read more
"this book has nothing that inspired me... it was boring, tedious and the characters were poor. i didn't care for the characters and their lives... i read this book because i had to."
"This book follows three Brown graduates at that crossroads of turning 30, trying to reach their potential and somewhat confused about why they haven't. SO disappointing that there wasn't much insight associated with this book...I was really looking forward to reading it, being a Brown graduate who just dealt with reaching my 30s and having read fantastic reviews of the book. Aside: Why did Messud have to pick on Brown??? There are shallow failures from every school. Okay, enough personal complaining. I found the writing to be good, but it didn't sweep me away. The characters were boring, obsessed with themselves and their ideas, but not so much with others. They see their function as contributing their ideas, rather than their energy or labor, to society, which might be alright if their ideas were more useful. If Messud's goal was a satire of self-important Ivy-Leaguers, she was effective, but I got the impression that she really thought she had developed meaningful characters that people could learn from. Hmmm. I was somewhat disappointed in how Messud used September 11 in her book--it is interesting to see how authors are approaching this (kind of interested in one reviewer's dissertation). I felt like she used it as a further excuse for her characters to do nothing, rather than as a real turning point for any of them. Again, being in the age group, a graduate of Brown, and thus acquainted with many people this age who are Ivy League graduates, I found these characters to be a poor representation--I think many people this age, of whatever background, are much more self-possessed, self-motivated, and more conscious of their role in society than these characters, most of whom I would probably actively avoid at parties. Most people learn from their introspection and from those around them, something these characters didn't master. If this was meant to be a satire, it fell short, and if it was meant to be an actual examination of these characters, if fell incredibly short.
I might be forgetting some details of the book, because I traded it at the used book store almost immediately upon completion, but my overall impression of this entire book was failure: failure of the characters to realize that WORK is required to reach goals, even if you are smart and well-educated, failure of the writer to differentiate among types of failure among the characters, failure of the writing to move beyond good to amazing. Perhaps most mysteriously, failure of the NYT book review to properly categorize this book as half-rate chick-lit."
"I wanted to read this book after I heard an interview with the author describing her process of writing this book. Apparently, she had come to a point with the characters and the story which she did not know how to get past. She, in fact, started to dislike all the characters and to find them deluded and filled with an inflated sense of their own importance. She was considering not finishing the novel at all. Then came September 11, 2001.
After the terrorist attacks, many people began to reevaluate their lives and work to find more meaning in them than ever before. The author wanted to give these characters that same opportunity for reflection and reinvention, so she wrote the real-life event into the book.
I have to say, while I found the book extremely ambitious and beautifully-written, I'd have liked it much more if the 9/11 interruption had come more in the middle of the book than at the end. Unfortunately, I found all of the characters shallow and unsympathetic, and the catharsis of the terrorist attack came too late for them to find redemption, in my opinion. I can certainly appreciate what Messud tried to do, but she didn't pull it off to my satisfaction."
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