Donna Tartt

The Goldfinch (Paperback)

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The Goldfinch (Paperback)

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3.7 out of 5stars
(10 reviews)
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Most helpful positive review

5.00 out of 5 stars review
Verified Purchaser
04/20/2014
You see one painting,...
"You see one painting, I see another, the art book puts it at another remove still ... and that's not even to mention the people separated from us by time - four hundred years before us, four hundred years after we're gone ... a really great painting is fluid enough to work its way into the mind and heart through all kinds of different angles, in ways that are unique and very particular. Yours, yours. I was painted for you." (Ch 12) A serendipitous visit to New York City's Museum of Modern Art changes thirteen-year-old Theo Decker's life. His mother, Audrey, is spellbound by a 1654 Dutch masterpiece, The Goldfinch, by Carel Fabritius. Theo, paying little attention to the art, is taken with Pippa, a young red haired girl who is in the museum with elderly uncle, Welty Blackwell. An explosion claims Audrey's life, seriously injures Pippa, and fatally injures Welty. In the old man's final moments, he instructs Theo to return the ring he is wearing to his parter, James Hobart (Hobie); and to take The Goldfinch. The day becomes the dividing mark for Theo's life: Before and After. Motherless, Theo is taken in first by wealthy family friends, the Barbours, and later by Hobie; until he joins his long absent father in Las Vegas. There he meets meet Boris, who becomes a lifelong acquaintance and criminal influence. The Goldfinch, still with Theo, becomes both his saving grace and his nemesis: "Taking it out, handling it, looking at it, was nothing to be done lightly. Even in the act of reaching for it there was sense of expansion, a waft, and a lifting ..." (Ch 6) But Theo has necessarily so long been disguised behind his theft that he has lost himself: "We are so accustomed to disguise ourselves to others, that in the end, we become disguised to ourselves." (Ch 7) What I Liked/Didn't: The Goldfinch has been referred to by some, namely Stephen King, as Tartt's masterpiece, and, yes, I'm paraphrasing. And while I've not read any of her other work, I wholly agree that is a novel that is smart and rare and connects both heart and mind. The characters are extraordinary - not necessarily likeable, and I include Theo in that assessment, but certainly ones who will live on with me for ages. My criticism: Las Vegas. This portion of the novel went on (and on) for hundreds of pages, and, to my mind, did not add much at all to the novel's worth, other than introducing Boris. What I Absolutely Loved: Tartt's meditations, and there were many, on the unsurpassed beauty and allure of great art, and on the gifts of great painters. I've opened and closed my review with two favourite quotes, and I loved this tidbit as well: "But the painting has also taught me that we can speak to each other across time." (Ch 12) Recommended: Highly! Particularly those interested in art and great art heists; and smartly written, unusual literary works. "His lines speak on their own. Sinewy wings; scratched pinfeather. The speed of his brush is visible, the sureness of his hand, paint dashed thick. And yet there are also half-transparent passages rendered so lovingly alongside the bold, pastose strokes that there's tenderness in the contrast, and even humor; the underlayer of paint is visible beneath the hairs of his brush; he wants us to feel the downy breast-fluff, the softness and texture of it, the brittleness of the little claw curled about the brass perch." (Ch 12)
lit_chick

Most helpful negative review

1.00 out of 5 stars review
Verified Purchaser
10/03/2021
Ugh! just Ugh! And a long and…
Ugh! just Ugh! And a long and horrible ugh as this large print version was 1200+ pages. I know this book has won many awards and has been on numerous bestseller lists... but I found it tedious and monotonous. I need my characters to be stronger and have some control over situations. I really don't want to know characters who do stupid things while spazzed out on illegal and legal drugs. I don't want to know what they feel like or what they do or what they see while on a high... or low.
RobertaLea
  • 1.00 out of 5 stars review
    Verified Purchaser
    10/03/2021
    Ugh! just Ugh! And a long and…
    Ugh! just Ugh! And a long and horrible ugh as this large print version was 1200+ pages. I know this book has won many awards and has been on numerous bestseller lists... but I found it tedious and monotonous. I need my characters to be stronger and have some control over situations. I really don't want to know characters who do stupid things while spazzed out on illegal and legal drugs. I don't want to know what they feel like or what they do or what they see while on a high... or low.
    RobertaLea
  • 3.00 out of 5 stars review
    Verified Purchaser
    08/16/2021
    fails to live up to an anti-gogol…
    fails to live up to an anti-gogol flavoured "good things happen to bad people" it explicitly wishes it had. Nabokov captured that spirit better and wrote far more interesting unlikeable characters. There are a few fantastic passages w.r.t Theo's trauma near the beginning but he quickly coasts by, empty and privileged. Similarly, I believe Tartt wants to write transgressive acts without judgement but ultimately defangs them. One is privileged to be transgressive in Tartt's world.
    .json
  • 4.00 out of 5 stars review
    Verified Purchaser
    08/28/2019
    I listened to the audiobook version of this 771 page chunkster. I usually don't like audiobooks but I thought this was probably my best chance of finishing the book before the movie is released in September. I ended up loving this audiobook. The reader, David Pittu, was excellent. The many characters and their different accents were all easily distinguishable. Thirteen year old Theo lives in NYC with his mother. His father has left them. Theo and his mother are in the Metropolitan Museum of Art when a terrorist bomb explodes. His mother is killed. Trapped in the museum after the bombing Theo speaks to a dying man, Welty. Welty tells him to hide the famous painting, The Goldfinch, which has fallen on the floor, in his backpack for safe keeping. Theo does. Theo eventually finds his way out of the museum. He never tells anyone that he has the painting. As you can imagine a lot will happen to Theo in the 700+ pages after the bombing. Theo will deal with his trauma by abusing drugs and alcohol. He will spend years fearful that Interpol is watching him. The big take away of the book is that his mother was his anchor. Once he lost her he just drifted away. Even when he had good, caring, decent friends helping him out, he decides to take a darker path. Ultimately this book left me feeling sad for almost every character.
    VioletBramble
  • 5.00 out of 5 stars review
    Verified Purchaser
    06/08/2016
    Wow, what a sprawling,...
    Wow, what a sprawling, magnificent, compelling story Tartt tells in this book that is about so much more than the painting referred to in the title. It's about art, beauty, fear, abandonment, carelessness, remorse, redemption, sorrow and joy. It's about the value of friendship, the pain of loss, the holes that life leaves in all of us and the ways we choose to fill them up. Theo Decker is 13 years old when a tragedy leaves him without parents. He is taken in by the family of a school friend, and just when it seems his life has begun to stabilize he is uprooted and set on a path that leads him from New York City to Las Vegas to Amsterdam and back again. He bounces around between various sets of parents, surrogate and otherwise, some of whom are loving but all of whom seem incapable of giving him the sort of focused attention that could help anchor him in the world around him. Instead, he is forced to use an inanimate object - that painting pictured on the cover - to be his touchstone. Unsurprisingly, it isn't enough to keep him safe in a world filled with so many easy ways to flirt with danger. The story that Theo tells is long, involved, intricate, densely layered with events that seem loaded with meaning beyond what they or he can bear. The further into the story I ventured, the stronger was my feeling of constant low-level anxiety for what would become of Theo. It seemed impossible from the very beginning that he would live happily ever after - that anyone in his world would - and every page I turned ratcheted up the tension. I didn't always like Theo. Often I disapproved of the choices he made and the things he did, but that didn't stop me from desperately wanting him to find the sanctuary that he seemed to spend his whole life looking for. I didn't always like the people he surrounded himself with. Or perhaps more accurately, I didn't always like the things he did with and to the people who surrounded him, and I didn't always like how even the most sympathetic of them still failed utterly at providing a safe harbor for a lost soul. And yet I still hoped, right up until the end, that each of them would be redeemed, that everything would work out, that everyone would - finally! - do the right thing for themselves and for Theo. The Goldfinch isn't a perfect book. It's long, almost unbearably long, made bearable for me only by the fact of its being an ebook and thus not an intimidating physical chunk to remind me of just how much story was left to tell. There are sections that go on and on and don't seem to do much to advance either the plot or the characters' development. There are a few too many supporting characters who are sketchily drawn and serve mainly as a placeholder for a group stereotype. But always, there was some redeeming action or insight waiting on the other side, rewarding me for pushing on. I finished reading The Goldfinch yesterday, and even as I've moved on to my next book I find myself thinking about Theo at random times during the day, as if he were someone I know. I recall particular passages or scenes and think about how often Tartt chooses to work against the expected tropes. The chilly upper-class woman whose family takes young Theo in turns out to genuinely like him and treat him as part of the family even long after he's grown up. None of the most important characters are purely saints or sinners; just as in real life people turn out to be more complicated than that. Just as this book is more complicated than a story about a painting.
    rosalita
  • 5.00 out of 5 stars review
    Verified Purchaser
    04/20/2014
    You see one painting,...
    "You see one painting, I see another, the art book puts it at another remove still ... and that's not even to mention the people separated from us by time - four hundred years before us, four hundred years after we're gone ... a really great painting is fluid enough to work its way into the mind and heart through all kinds of different angles, in ways that are unique and very particular. Yours, yours. I was painted for you." (Ch 12) A serendipitous visit to New York City's Museum of Modern Art changes thirteen-year-old Theo Decker's life. His mother, Audrey, is spellbound by a 1654 Dutch masterpiece, The Goldfinch, by Carel Fabritius. Theo, paying little attention to the art, is taken with Pippa, a young red haired girl who is in the museum with elderly uncle, Welty Blackwell. An explosion claims Audrey's life, seriously injures Pippa, and fatally injures Welty. In the old man's final moments, he instructs Theo to return the ring he is wearing to his parter, James Hobart (Hobie); and to take The Goldfinch. The day becomes the dividing mark for Theo's life: Before and After. Motherless, Theo is taken in first by wealthy family friends, the Barbours, and later by Hobie; until he joins his long absent father in Las Vegas. There he meets meet Boris, who becomes a lifelong acquaintance and criminal influence. The Goldfinch, still with Theo, becomes both his saving grace and his nemesis: "Taking it out, handling it, looking at it, was nothing to be done lightly. Even in the act of reaching for it there was sense of expansion, a waft, and a lifting ..." (Ch 6) But Theo has necessarily so long been disguised behind his theft that he has lost himself: "We are so accustomed to disguise ourselves to others, that in the end, we become disguised to ourselves." (Ch 7) What I Liked/Didn't: The Goldfinch has been referred to by some, namely Stephen King, as Tartt's masterpiece, and, yes, I'm paraphrasing. And while I've not read any of her other work, I wholly agree that is a novel that is smart and rare and connects both heart and mind. The characters are extraordinary - not necessarily likeable, and I include Theo in that assessment, but certainly ones who will live on with me for ages. My criticism: Las Vegas. This portion of the novel went on (and on) for hundreds of pages, and, to my mind, did not add much at all to the novel's worth, other than introducing Boris. What I Absolutely Loved: Tartt's meditations, and there were many, on the unsurpassed beauty and allure of great art, and on the gifts of great painters. I've opened and closed my review with two favourite quotes, and I loved this tidbit as well: "But the painting has also taught me that we can speak to each other across time." (Ch 12) Recommended: Highly! Particularly those interested in art and great art heists; and smartly written, unusual literary works. "His lines speak on their own. Sinewy wings; scratched pinfeather. The speed of his brush is visible, the sureness of his hand, paint dashed thick. And yet there are also half-transparent passages rendered so lovingly alongside the bold, pastose strokes that there's tenderness in the contrast, and even humor; the underlayer of paint is visible beneath the hairs of his brush; he wants us to feel the downy breast-fluff, the softness and texture of it, the brittleness of the little claw curled about the brass perch." (Ch 12)
    lit_chick
  • 5.00 out of 5 stars review
    Verified Purchaser
    02/23/2014
    This one gets 5 stars,...
    This one gets 5 stars, and maybe that's all you need to know. If you haven't read it, go read it. If you haven't read it, you may not want to read this, as some aspects of the story of course are revealed. Donna Tartt has accomplished the rarity of a powerful page-turner that is written on an enormous canvas, that asks, and to a larger than expected extent answers, big questions. It has readers all over the country aching to help the downtrodden main character Theo make better decisions, while they laugh helplessly at the antics of his one great friend, bad boy Boris. It all revolves around the painting of The Goldfinch identified in the title. Reportedly the Frick Museum in New York is now attracting big crowds every day clamoring to see it. Although Tartt's story is made up, this beautiful painting by a contemporary of Vermeer, little known painter Carel Fabritius, is real. In the novel a bomb explosion in the museum changes high schooler Theo's life and, at the urging of a dying man, brings the painting, his mother's favorite, into his possession. His beloved mother has died in the explosion, and his scoundrel father had previously disappeared, so only child Theo is on his own. Eventually he ends up with the wealthy Park Avenue family of his schoolmate Andy. The mother is chilly, but her charity toward Theo helps him make it through a difficult time, and she will re-enter his adult life. "Her voice, like Andy's, was hollow and infinitely far away; even when she was standing right next to you she sounded as if she were relaying transmissions from Alpha Centauri". As for his affect-less geek friend Andy, "Sometimes I wondered what it would take to break Andy out of his math-nerd turret: a tidal wave? Decepticon invasion? Godzilla tromping down Fifth Avenue? He was a planet without an atmosphere." Via a last request from the dying man in the museum, Theo comes to know antique furniture refurbisher Hobie, and Hobie's sweet ward Pippa, who is Theo's age and also a survivor of the museum explosion. Theo yearns for the relaxed, safe atmosphere provided by Hobie and his back of the store living quarters in the Village in Manhattan: "{S}ometimes I could lull myself back to sleep by thinking of his house, where without realizing it you slipped away sometimes into 1850, a world of ticking clocks and creaking floorboards, copper pots and baskets of turnips and onions in the kitchen, candle flames leaning all to the left in the draft of an opened door and tall parlor windows billowing and swagged like ball gowns, cool quiet rooms where old things slept." Theo comes to live with Hobie, who is a disheveled and kind-hearted craftsman who brings some stability to Theo's life. Theo in turn begins to learn Hobie's trade. But then Theo's father reappears and takes him to live with his father's girlfriend in a sterile outpost of Las Vegas townhouses. There Theo meets Boris, a crooked Russian mining magnate's son with an idiosyncratic grasp of English. Like Theo, Boris has repeatedly been left to his own devices, but in Boris's short lifetime that has occurred all over the world, as he has traveled with his father. In Indonesia Boris briefly and happily converted to Islam, because the Muslims were so good to him. "{T}he mosque was brilliant. Falling down place - stars shining through at night - birds on the roof. An old Javanese man taught us the Koran. And they fed me too, and were kind, and made sure I was clean and had clean clothes. Sometimes I fell asleep on my prayer rug. And at salah, near dawn, when the birds woke up, always the sound of wings beating!" Boris has endless enthusiasm for life even as he routinely engages in self-destructive behavior. The two ingest astounding quantities of drugs while living their unsupervised lives. As they grow older, their paths will cross in unusual ways, their friendship always strong and shaping the events that follow. "{I}t occurred to me that despite his faults, which were numerous and spectacular, the reason I liked Boris and felt happy around him from almost the moment I'd met him was that he was never afraid. You didn't meet many people who moved freely through the world with such a vigorous contempt for it and at the same time such oddball and unthwartable faith in what, in childhood, he had liked to call, 'the Planet of Earth'". The characters are all three-dimensional. Even Theo's father, one of the most reprehensible individuals ever to inhabit a book, has more than one side to him. Boris appreciates his kindness: "feeding me, talking with me, spending time, sheltering me in his roof, giving me the clothes off his back . . . you hated your father so much but in some ways he was a good man." "I wouldn't say good." "Well I would." "well, you would be the only one. You would be wrong." The painting eventually brings both Theo and Boris into danger, as they team up to retrieve it from international crooks. I'll leave it up to you to find out how that is resolved. All of this makes putting the book down nearly impossible. But at the same time Tartt manages to weave in bigger questions and issues, including about the experience of art. At one point Hobie says, "You see one painting, I see another, the art book puts it at another remove still, the lady buying the greeting card at the museum gift shop sees something else entire, and that's not even to mention the people separated from us in time - four hundred years before us, four hundred years after we're gone - it'll never strike anyone the same way and the great majority of people it'll never strike in any deep way at all but - a really great painting is fluid enough to work its way through all kinds of different angles, in ways that are unique and very particular. Yours, yours. I was painted for you.." And what does the beautiful Goldfinch itself have to tell us, a bird fettered by a chain but given eternal life in this painting? Tartt takes on the meaning of life (the answer is not "42", for you Douglas Adams fans), and God ("a long term pattern we can't decipher {like a} huge, slow-moving weather system rolling in on us from afar") and more. Theo experiences horrible loss, and makes headshaking mistakes, but continues on with the same unthwartable faith as Boris. "Sometimes, unexpectedly, grief pounded over me in waves that left me gasping; and when the waves washed back, I found myself looking out over a brackish wreck which was illuminated in a light so lucid, so heartsick and empty, that I could hardly remember that the world had ever been anything but dead." He longs for romance with Pippa, but are they too closely tied by the trauma they both have experienced? When he is in that home with Hobie, in those "cool quiet rooms where old things slept", he learns what is most important in his life. But he repeatedly risks losing that haven with his risky behavior and passion for the painting. For the reader who avidly rides through all this with Theo and Boris, there is an insatiable desire to guide each of them into safer harbors. They won't have it. It is a large, profound story, and you won't forget either of them, or the others that surround them.
    jnwelch
  • 5.00 out of 5 stars review
    Verified Purchaser
    02/19/2014
    --if a painting reall...
    "--if a painting really works down in your heart and changes the way you see, and think, and feel, you don't think, 'oh, I love this picture because it's universal.' 'I love this painting because it speaks to all mankind.' That's not the reason anyone loves a piece of art. It's a secret whisper from an alleyway. Psst, you. Hey kid. Yes you." And it's the same with books; the way one book will be read and thought good and worthy and cause thoughts like, 'I can see why this is a classic.' or 'I'm glad to have read it, even if I didn't enjoy the reading of it all that much.' And then you pick up another book and you lose chunks of time, dishes remain in the sink, unwashed, you'll count the hours until you can reasonably spend time with the book again. Donna Tartt's third novel was that kind of book for me. This is the story of Theo Decker who, when the book opens, is a not particularly well-behaved thirteen year old who is on his way, with his mother, to a meeting with his school's headmaster, to discuss Theo's suspension. On the way, there is a sudden rainstorm, causing he and his mother to duck into the Met and then into a special exhibit to visit his mother's favorite painting, by Carel Fabritius, of a small pet bird. Things happen. Theo's life changes drastically, over and over again. Tartt shows how precarious the life of a minor child is, no matter how secure their lives seem to be. In a moment, he's left adrift and at the mercy of distant relatives, the parents of friends and the kindness or indifference of strangers. Theo is thrown from one precarious refuge to another, often without a clear understanding of how long he'll be staying, always trying to stay out of the way. He's adrift and responsible for his own life in a way no teenager can manage. I'm not the best judge of this book; I liked it far too much to be objective. I can say that it's meaty and complex and surprisingly fast-paced and that I enjoyed it enormously.
    RidgewayGirl
  • 2.00 out of 5 stars review
    Verified Purchaser
    02/14/2014
    Too long. Come on! It ...
    Too long. Come on! It seemed like 50 pages of being sick in a hotel room at the end. Lost interest around page 600. Liked Boris much more than Theo. Could have edited out 300 pages.
    Alphawoman
  • 2.00 out of 5 stars review
    Verified Purchaser
    01/29/2014
    I finished this book w...
    I finished this book with regret - regret that I had invested so much of my time reading this 771-page tome. It has received many rave reviews and was chosen as a Best Book of 2013 by the New York Times. Last week it was at the top of the best seller list in Maclean's. I am obviously in the minority, but I found it wordy and pretentious. Thirteen-year-old Theo Decker survives a bombing at an art museum, but his mother is killed. He escapes without anyone noticing him and takes with him The Goldfinch, a painting by a 17th-century Dutch painter. He is provided a home by the family of a schoolmate before being taken to Las Vegas by his father, a man whose personality is dominated by the addiction gene. Later he moves in with Hobie, the business partner of a man who spoke his dying words to Theo after the museum explosion and who (Theo believes) told him to take the painting with him. As he drifts into adulthood, he keeps the painting despite experiencing tremendous guilt about having it in his possession. Eventually he is drawn into the criminal underworld which uses stolen masterpieces as currency. I was expecting the novel to examine the power of art on our lives, and I was not disappointed in this regard. There are several discussions of the impact of art. Hobie tells Theo, "'And isn't the whole point of things - beautiful things - that they connect you to some larger beauty'" (757)? Hobie insists that a painting can change "'the way you see, and think, and feel'" (758). For Theo, The Goldfinch is a thing of beauty but it also connects him to his mother who loved the painting. At one point, he says that "The painting had made me feel less mortal, less ordinary" (559). At the end, he summarizes that "Whatever teaches us to talk to ourselves is important: whatever teaches us to sing ourselves out of despair. But the painting has also taught me that we can speak to each other across time" (771). Theo, the narrator, is not a likeable person. At the beginning one would have to be totally heartless not to sympathize with a child who loses a parent he desperately loves after having been abandoned by a selfish, unfaithful father. The Barbour family takes him in and provides him with a home, but it is a temporary arrangement and Mrs. Barbour is not the maternal type. When Theo's father reappears, he proves to be anything but a model parent. It becomes difficult to sympathize however, as Theo continues to make one poor decision after another, well into adulthood. Even when provided with a stable home and support and affection, Theo comes across as an ingrate as he behaves in ways that put all that in jeopardy. One could make a plausible argument that Theo suffers from post-traumatic stress, but from the very beginning he wallows in self-pity and behaves in ways that are self-destructive and hurtful to others; for example, after his father left, Theo engaged in petty criminality even though the staff at his school was very supportive and even though he understood the consequences for him and the hurt his beloved mother would experience. Then, in the end, he makes an appraisal of his role in preserving art; arguing that love follows art through time, he decides that he played a "bright, immutable part in that Immortality." And he concludes with a lofty statement: "And I add my own love to the history of people who have loved beautiful things, and looked out for them, and pulled them from the fire, and sought them when they were lost, and tried to preserve them and save them while passing them along literally from hand to hand, singing out brilliantly from the wreck of time to the next generation of lovers, and the next" (771). His mother once said to him that "'anything we manage to save from history is a miracle'" (28) and he implies that he has helped perform a miracle?! Oh please! As a teen in Las Vegas, Theo meets Boris who has a tremendous impact on Theo's life. I found Boris unbelievable. He is fluent in multiple languages and reads Dostoevsky even though he is drunk or high most of the time? Hobie is another unbelievable character; in his case, he is just too good to be true. When Theo finally admits to Hobie of an illegal scheme that could have dire consequences for both him and Hobie, Hobie isn't angry; instead, he blames himself: "'I'm as much to blame for this as you'" (497). When he later learns of Theo's further criminality, he says, "'It does all swing around strangely sometimes, doesn't it? . . . How funny time is. How many tricks and surprises'" (753). The plotting is very slow and occasionally stretches credibility. The description of the explosion's aftermath made me wonder if Theo would ever find his way out of the museum. And when he does, he manages to get out without anyone seeing him? The drinking and drug use sessions in Las Vegas go on and on. The descriptions of the effects of drugs become tedious in their repetitiveness. The extensive tangents are unnecessary; for example, if I were interested in furniture restoration, I'd consult non-fiction books written by an expert in the field. Horst, "a bad junkie" (572) goes on for pages about the technical skill of various artists. And the number of coincidences is problematic. Boris, for instance, makes an appearance just when he is expected to do so. There are so many coincidences that it seems the author feels she has to justify them: "'Who was it said that coincidence was just God's way of remaining anonymous'" (758). Characters are always exchanging meaningful glances: "A glance was exchanged - the heft of which I recognized instantly" (531) and "They looked at each other and some unspoken something seemed to pass between them" (570). The scenes in Amsterdam, those outside Theo's hotel room, are perfect for an action film but are not in the same genre as the rest of the novel. Much has been made of the style of the book. There is no doubt that the author is intelligent and educated, but at times I sensed some pretension. The number of literary and artistic allusions is impressive. German, Russian, Polish, French and Dutch phrases are used. But is a sentence of over 200 words really necessary (715)? There were several times when I considered abandoning the book; however, I kept hoping I would encounter something that would change my largely negative opinion and that somehow the book, unlike the tethered goldfinch in the painting, would be able to soar. It did not. At one point, Theo describes the finch in the painting as "fluttering briefly, forced always to land in the same hopeless place" (306). The book does the same.
    Schatje
  • 5.00 out of 5 stars review
    Verified Purchaser
    11/01/2013
    This is a deeply engro...
    This is a deeply engrossing novel about one character's very complex life. I thoroughly enjoyed every part of this novel. The main character, Theo, does not always make the best choices for his situation but the author allows us to feel his emotions with clarity and understand the choices he makes, some good some bad. The reader does not have to agree with Theo but one does feel a strong empathy in each of his dilemmas and therefore the author presents the reader with a good deal of moral questioning that stays with one long after the book is finished. Yes, it was a very long novel and yes it could have been shortened but why?? Does one read to race to the end of a story or to be immersed in the expertise of the writer to tell a complex story? Some reviewers will not enjoy the story and will probably find it depressing or sad, but do we read only things that make us comfortable or to we sometimes want a book that tests our complacency in life?? I will be thinking about Theo and his friends for a long time - well done!!
    kmmt48
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