Ira David Socol

Amazing

Revisado: 02-27-25

Like Tommy Orange's There There, Wandering Stars is a masterpiece of non-Anglo storytelling. There are no hero's journeys here, because that's nothing more than "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" nonsense designed to keep people wanting. Instead There are real characters fighting to survive a hostile environment. Characters you will love.

The various narrative voices, performed brilliantly be the cast, will keep you enthralled.

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Don't lie in your preface

Revisado: 01-21-25

No, I never made it to chapter 1. For authors audiobooks have a risk factor: people may actually listen to your preface and introduction. Burroway opens by lying about other books and authors in an attempt to prove her superiority. Unfortunately, in my writing education I have actually read some of the books she insults and know that she has either not read them or is choosing to be untruthful. Why would I keep listening?

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uneven and often brilliant

Revisado: 11-11-24

A powerful book that captures the chaos of 1970s New York City. McCann violates every fiction workshop rule, shifting POV sometimes randomly, shifting tense, jumping among characters. It does mostly work. From the viewpoint of 2024 a white male who has only lived in New York and Dublin writing first-person narratives for a Black woman born in 1920 rural Missouri is cringe worthy, and his attempt to capture a Jewish judge is almost comic. But he pulls other characters off especially when he uses third person.

Worth it, even if you may doubt the critics, because if an unknown author's manuscript like this reached a critic, they'd toss it in the trash.

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If Tana French had known real people

Revisado: 09-07-23

Her novels might have sounded like this. Yes, it's too long. No doubt 100 or more pages might have been edited. But the characters have a reality to them and the multiple voices are beautifully expressed.

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Truly Great Writing

Revisado: 09-07-23

This isn't a complicated story. it describes being 20-something in many of our lives. it's just that real lives don't usually get captured in published novels because those who get published usually have connections - which means they've had privileged lives.

But Sean is living life. And Magee's words are deceptively simple. True dialogue beautifully rendered. Fabulous narration as well.

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an incompetent uninteresting psychologist

Revisado: 08-02-23

Couldn't get through it. I hardly ever give up on a book, but if you're going to write about a character who ignores all rules and all common sense... maybe don't make that character an upper middle class bore.

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Poor writing, terrible performance

Revisado: 11-26-22

If you have no idea how a woman speaks, don't try reading a book with a female character

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Could any character be this passive?

Revisado: 10-06-22

I stick with books almost every time but I stopped in the middle of chapter 4. If the protagonist is as passive and uninteresting as the performer makes her sound, I couldn't possibly stick with her. I love the author, but this was awful.

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Fabulous concept, beautifully written

Revisado: 09-29-22

What a great book. The concept was original, the telling was exciting. The performance matched the writing exactly.

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Incredibly inventive and informative memoir

Revisado: 03-31-22

The author grows up in a family that refuses to acknowledge that he is blind. As for all who struggle with both disability and the inability of those around them to comprehend, this brings wonder, and heartbreak, and a very long path to self-acceptance. Kuusisto tells this brilliantly with the skills of a master poet.

Whether watching as he hurtles through streets on a bicycle, or listening to the cruelty as he tries to fully engage the world, or discovering what it's like to accept who you are when others will not, the words in Planet of the Blind will carry you away on a tide of knowledge gain.

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