Book-a-book of the Month Club discussion

Feel free to share your review of The Nix here

Uh, I gave this book a solid three stars.

Pros:
* The detail
* The jumping back and forth through time
* The interweaving mystery that delivered solidly at the end
* The way that when a story by someone was being told the story transported to their life and just picked up with them

Cons:
* All the cynicism, it was non-stop for nearly 95% of the book.
* The ending... seemed to me if you were going to have a bleak "real" story for 95% of the book why suddenly do a 180°?
* Repetition. I like a book that makes me think and have to remember what was going on so that I can "get it." But this book pretty much spoon fed meaning and brought up past points it foreshadowed so much that it felt like you could have picked the book up at any chapter and gone through to the end with nothing lost.

I totally agree about the "spoon feeding." It feels like he's hitting us over the head with meaning and purpose. I want some subtlety, man.

Three stars from me, too. I enjoyed the story, but the author was a little too ambitious in wanting to cover everything that he possibly could. About a third of it could be truncated and we still wouldn't lose much.

I liked the weaving back-and-forth through time to bring us the changes/differences between the Samuel and Faye now and the Samuel and Faye in the past. However, I feel like there was a huge disconnect between the two versions of themselves, though it's mostly Faye I'm having trouble connecting. I don't know if I really buy it. The Faye now seems so aloof and in-her-own-world and not really fleshed out enough for my taste, versus the old one who seemed at least responsible.

Honestly didn't like (view spoiler)[ending much, either. Everything felt too neat. Everything's resolved, and then we also get the shock value of the Norway episode. Not that what happened isn't improbable, but it just did not feel natural. I don't really know how to explain it. (hide spoiler)]

(view spoiler)[Oh yeah, I'd like to think that the people in Norway would see a strange woman standing in their yard and invite them in to stay indefinitely and look at photo albums... I had to make the mental decision to give the author creative license here, to enjoy it.

The ending was way too neat. In my ending:

Pwnage dies.
Laura can't keep her shit together with the next teacher and she gets caught again only to be dropped from college and open her own marketing business with her dad's money and goes on to be wildly rich without ever having needed to go to college.
Faye accepts the fact that she has been a horrible secretive person and does everything she can to correct things with Henry; Samuel helps. It's a slow road.
Samuel refuses to put his name on the book and goes to live with his "trying to make it work" parents until the school re-instates his teaching career where he meets a single mother who he cliques with and finds out that being a father is one of those blessings about life that actually gives him a sense of purpose and reason to have lived his life and pass on his experience.
Periwinkle's whole lawsuit is frivolous and a total bluff to get Samuel to jump through hoops, like everything else it was just a way to make money. The book does so well anyways that he just rolls onto the next project without a care about how horrible he is.
(hide spoiler)]

Click for my review

Now I need to go back and catch up on the discussion threads!

Joe - I definitely like your ending better (view spoiler)[ The Pwnage resolution was WAY too neat and frustrating. Is it bad to say I wanted him to die because it just felt right? (hide spoiler)]

Lol, no. Not at all. Probably why it seemed so out of place.

Mathew wrote: "With this book, it was like the author shoved all 10 chores into the 4 hours, so they were either only partially done or done sloppily. "

Yeah, there seemed to be a lot of points that were half made, but not solidified. This might be why certain characters feel superfluous. Laura, in particular, it seemed like there was a lot of feeling and thought put into her from the author and that she just became a big loose end.

Seems like this might be the most split response we have had to a book club selection so far. Not sure if that is good or bad!?

Matthew wrote: "Seems like this might be the most split response we have had to a book club selection so far. Not sure if that is good or bad!?"

I think it's a good thing. Everyone agreeing on everything wouldn't give us varied opinions or perspectives. It'd also be kind of scary, too.

Well, once again I have not begin reading with the group, but I did request a copy from Overdrive. I want to say, though, that in my RL book club, the months when everyone feels the same about the book are when we have the least discussion. We really need the opinions to be varied, and the more widely so, the better. If we all agree, it becomes five minutes of stating our opinion and then an hour and a half of gossipy catching up! Not that we don't love that, but we could do that anytime, book or no.

Well, this is what I call “trying to tick all the boxes”. Some really good parts but as a whole this didn’t quite work for me. 3 stars.

Pedro Matilde wrote: "Well, this is what I call “trying to tick all the boxes”. Some really good parts but as a whole this didn’t quite work for me. 3 stars."

Looks like how you felt reflects the split opinion from the discussion above! :)

I think he actually has some skills as a writer and had a really good story to tell. Less would have been much more.