Eugenides' novel is in itself an exploration of the very nature and impetus of the novel form. I found myself completely wrapped up in the lives of the three main characters. Thoroughly enjoyable, and at times, painfully raw-highly recommended!

I'd never read any Eugenides before but had only heard good things about him, largely due to him being the author of The Virgin Suicides. A friend suggested this title for our bookclub and reading the back of the book - set in the 1980s and with reference to Jane Austen and George Eliot - it sounded like a winner. I could not have been more wrong! It is literally as if the author had a checklist of what to include in the book - an attractive woman who is slightly promiscuous, a geeky man who is in love with her and the bad boy whom she is in love with. The plot is dull and generic and the only slight chance of redemption for me was the fact it was set in the 1980s. However, the author even seems to get this wrong and when the novel makes an allusion to the feminist movement it is so patronising it simply comes across as a pat on the head for his female readers. In addition, the characters are uninteresting, and for the most part annoying, and I had no empathy with any of them. The novel isn't punctuated with chapters, instead being split into several parts, which just seems to elongate the novel unnecessarily and makes it more of a slog to get through. I didn't find it particularly well written either and found it incredibly overly descriptive which added nothing to storyline or enjoyment. This book is lazy and hard work to read which is not really what I look for in a novel. As I said, I haven't read any other novels by Eugenides but frankly after reading this I am entirely disinclined to ever pick up another one. My advice would be to choose something else altogether and to not make the same mistake I did!

From the synopsis I was expecting this to be a light-hearted intelligent ‘chick-lit’. Unfortunately for me it was not. I didn’t even get around to finishing this novel as I really couldn’t identify with the setting or the characters. I found the narrative too distant and the characters were all equally unlikeable, with no redeeming qualities. When I read a novel I like to be entertained, comforted and escape to somewhere new. This book didn’t do any of those things for me at all. If you like to read stories of troubled American college students in the 1980s, this could be the book for you.