⇒ Read Gratis Manhattan Beach A Novel Jennifer Egan 9781476716732 Books

Manhattan Beach A Novel Jennifer Egan 9781476716732 Books

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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NEW YORK’S “ONE BOOK, ONE NEW YORK” PICK

Winner of the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction

The daring and magnificent novel from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author.

Named One of the Best Books of the Year by NPR, Esquire, Vogue, The Washington Post, The Guardian, USA TODAY, Time • A New York Times Notable Book

Anna Kerrigan, nearly twelve years old, accompanies her father to visit Dexter Styles, a man who, she gleans, is crucial to the survival of her father and her family. She is mesmerized by the sea beyond the house and by some charged mystery between the two men.

‎Years later, her father has disappeared and the country is at war. Anna works at the Brooklyn Naval Yard, where women are allowed to hold jobs that once belonged to men, now soldiers abroad. She becomes the first female diver, the most dangerous and exclusive of occupations, repairing the ships that will help America win the war. One evening at a nightclub, she meets Dexter Styles again, and begins to understand the complexity of her father’s life, the reasons he might have vanished.

With the atmosphere of a noir thriller, Egan’s first historical novel follows Anna and Styles into a world populated by gangsters, sailors, divers, bankers, and union men. Manhattan Beach is a deft, dazzling, propulsive exploration of a transformative moment in the lives and identities of women and men, of America and the world. It is a magnificent novel by the author of A Visit from the Goon Squad, one of the great writers of our time.

Manhattan Beach A Novel Jennifer Egan 9781476716732 Books

I was eager to read this having enjoyed Egan's other work but I was vastly disappointed. I cannot understand the overwhelming, unmitigated praise for what seems an almost ("almost" because I hate to say it) cliched novel with stock characters - the main character a plucky young woman who refuses to have her dreams contained by convention (how many times have we seen this before?), the stock attractive gangster trying to go straight, the missing father who turns out to be a hero, the floozie with a heart of gold, the disabled but angelic sister - they are all here contained in an outlandish plot that defies all credibility. Long on meaningless detail (let no research go unpublished) but short on character development. I could hardly make it to the end. I felt like one of the characters lost at sea for days on end without a credible character in sight.


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Manhattan Beach A Novel Jennifer Egan 9781476716732 Books Reviews

{My Thoughts}

What Worked For Me
Old Movie Quality – Many times when I was reading Manhattan Beach I felt a sort of old noir movie vibe going on. I pictured the whole story in black and white, especially the nightclubs and bars, filled with the beautiful people and run by gangsters. The era, spanning the depression to the end of WWII, lent itself to the old-fashioned feel, with Egan’s beautiful writing adding another rich layer.

A Girl with Gumption – For the most part I liked Anna Kerrigan, the young woman at the heart of Egan’s story. Her family had been dealt some hard blows including a vanished father, and Anna did everything she could to make life better for her mother and crippled younger sister. Anna’s desire to become a diver felt real and her course to achieve that goal was one of the parts of this book that I liked best. Everything about Anna’s quest to become a diver was interesting.

Themes of Change and Redemption – Both Dexter Styles and Eddie Kerrigan came to be on quests for redemption. Both had made decisions in their lives that they’d begun to regret, but neither found change an easy path to walk.

“…Dexter felt the protesting part of himself – angry, eager to be done – slide abruptly away. He settled into the project of providing this accursed creature an experience of the sea. He absorbed the importance of it, the singleness of the task. It was a relief.”

Like Dexter and her father, Anna also sought to make-over her life.

What Didn’t
A Slow, Slow Pace – I’m so sorry to say it, but for me Manhattan Beach was just plain slow. I almost quit at about 67%, instead I rallied and kept going. Throughout the book there were times when it felt like the pace was about to pick up, but then? It didn’t.

Under-developed Characters – I never felt like I really knew or understood any of the three primary characters, making some of their actions almost incomprehensible. Egan spent a lot of time on side characters who seemed to pop in and out of the story when the plot needed to move. A tighter focus on the primary characters might have saved Manhattan Beach for me.

Vanishing Character – Eddie was missing for much of the book and then suddenly took over. Why? His story dominated the second half and was filled with characters who meant nothing to everything else that had been happening.

Implausible Actions – Had I known the characters better some of the choices they made might have been a little more believable for me. As it was, the book required me to suspend disbelief too many times to really enjoy the story.

{The Final Assessment}

Rarely do I write such a negative review, but I did finish Manhattan Beach and my commitment is to reviewing books I finish. I admit, I probably should have quit on this book, but just never could quite believe it wasn’t going to turn the corner into brilliance. For me it didn’t, but Booklist, Kirkus, Library Journal, and Publisher’s Weekly can’t all be wrong. I look forward to hearing what others think of Jennifer Egan’s latest. Grade C-

Note I received a copy of this book from the publisher (via NetGalley) in exchange for my honest opinions.
My book group has been together for about five years and has read about 40 books. Within the group we have a diverse set of tastes and while we sometimes all agree that a book is good, we had never all agreed that a book was irredeemable. That is, until Manhattan Beach. This novel was agreed unanimously to be the worst book we have read. We found this all the more remarkable given Jennifer Egan's reputation and the glowing reviews of the novel in major newspapers and magazines. Unlike every book group discussion that preceded it, this discussion devolved into an amusing contest to best describe why the book was so bad (for there were so many features to choose from), and went on to become a meditation on whether book reviews in media outlets are a corrupt endeavor. Dwight Garner of the NYT called the novel "immensely satisfying." We simply cannot understand this.

The sources of badness in the novel are replete. In fact, the book fails miserably at being any of the things it seems to want to be. Is it a period piece about second world war New York? An inspiring story about a plucky girl growing up without a father? A story about ethnicity or class divisions? A story about diving or the merchant marines? The effect of illness on a family? Well, I guess it is all of things yet none of them. The overwhelming impression of Manhattan Beach is that the author had no purpose in writing the book and may have indeed finished in a place that was very different than the place she started. Ultimately, we had no idea as readers what we should take away from this book.

A couple of aspects of the book bear noting. In particular, the plot is incredibly unlikely with multiple rapid and unbelievable pivots required to maintain the forward movement of the story. Again, Egan seemed to write herself into a corner and then fall back on amateurish devices to get herself out. The book is filled with coincidences and unexplained shifts that leave the reader scratching her head or, in all of our cases at least, putting the book down in despair. Even so, a better review might have been possible if the writing had been good. But what we were maybe the most surprised about given Egan's reputation was the prevalence of cringe-inducing passages that sounded like the product of a recently minted MFA rather than an established writer of repute.

This book has been described as a more conventional novel, a page-turner, or even a beach read. If that is what you are looking for then I think you can do far better. For me this book lacks all of the attributes of a book that would succeed within those genres. And it isn't good literature either, for sure. In the end it is a confused and disappointing mess.
I was eager to read this having enjoyed Egan's other work but I was vastly disappointed. I cannot understand the overwhelming, unmitigated praise for what seems an almost ("almost" because I hate to say it) cliched novel with stock characters - the main character a plucky young woman who refuses to have her dreams contained by convention (how many times have we seen this before?), the stock attractive gangster trying to go straight, the missing father who turns out to be a hero, the floozie with a heart of gold, the disabled but angelic sister - they are all here contained in an outlandish plot that defies all credibility. Long on meaningless detail (let no research go unpublished) but short on character development. I could hardly make it to the end. I felt like one of the characters lost at sea for days on end without a credible character in sight.