A VISIT FROM THE GOON SQUAD by Jennifer Egan

A book review. Full disclosure: I listened to an audio book.

I've read a few books this year where every chapter tells a different character's story from his/her point of view. While I like the idea of different perspectives, it always leads to the same frustration: I spend enough time with a character to feel connected to them, and I always want to know more about a different part of the story than they are sharing. OLIVE KITTERIDGE overcame this by having intimate character studies as each chapter/short story that had definitive beginnings, middles, and endings. A VISIT FROM THE GOON SQUAD has plenty of compelling characters, but we only see brief glimpses of them, and as the characters appear in other stories, I was left with the longing to revisit some of them. But the design of new POV's for each chapter doesn't lend itself to that. The beginning, middle, and end weren't always so clear.

The prose itself was lovely. The transitions from one character/chapter to the next always felt clever and organic. The individual voices of the characters were distinct, and that's difficult to pull off with so many characters. Unfortunately, the book ended with a whimper. Endings are hard and AVFTGS is a testament to that. I felt it ended with one of the book's weakest chapters, and that's not how you want to go out. ***

Rating System:

**** = Amazing, Fantastic, Life-Changing
*** = Excellent & Worth a Read
** = Not a Complete Waste of Time but I Probably Wouldn't Recommend It
* = Blech!

And I don't do that half-star nonsense.