Although I felt that the novel as a whole was highly flawed, the story itself, with the historical background set in Cooperstown (renamed Templeton), New York, is very well done. I was never able to warm up to the main character, Willie - she just wasn't very likeable. She has made a lot of mistakes and doesn't seem to learn from them. At the end of the book I got the impression that she would go on with her life making the same mistakes all over again. Her mother, Vi, while also somewhat immature, has learned something from past mistakes and is trying to make the future better. The people from the town's past come across as much more interesting than the modern ones. Their stories are fascinating, and it's interesting how Groff has each narrate his or her own part of the story. The story is original and I really loved the Cooperstown background. I remember being a tourist in Cooperstown, and the author's references to the Farmer's Museum, Baseball Hall of Fame, etc. were just as I remembered it. ( )

I absolutely loved this book! I spent my early childhood in Cooperstown, NY, as did the author, and she made dozens, maybe hundreds, of references to the history and mythology of that lovely little "village in a snowglobe" and its founders. The mix of fact and fiction was dazzlingly brilliant! ( )

Lovely. Very different and fresh and beautifully written. Groff is a great new voice, and The Monsters of Templeton is a very original love letter to a small town. ( )

I'm not sure where to even start with this! I had a lot of fun with this book - it's clever, quirky, so many unexpected things happen. Groff is deft at writing contemporary stories of love and loss as well as mysterious stories about monsters and ghosts with a big dose of historical fiction and detective work thrown in. I should have known, after reading her collection of short stories, Delicate Edible Birds, how versatile she is in her storytelling, but one wouldn't expect such versatility in a novel to work. It does. ( )

(#35 in the 2008 Book Challenge)

Delightful! Winsome! SO GOOD. I am very enthusiastic about this book. An anthropology student in the middle of a personal crisis returns to her hometown in Central New York and starts researching her family tree. There is nothing I like better than a good multi-generational family saga, and this one also has that "small town is full of secrets" thing going on. And it has a wee bit of the mystical, but not too much -- a lake monster, a ghost, and a pharmacist -- but it's a small part of the plot and if you don't like the fantastic elements you could interpret them as symbolism, I suppose.

I cannot express how much I love lake monsters. As a kid, I so, so badly wanted the Loch Ness monster to be real so that we could be Best Friends Forever. Just me and my lake monster, hanging out. I would even put aside my dread horror of That's Incredible to watch when they had segments about Loch Ness.

The book is not perfect, it's a first novel and the dialogue seems especially clunky and overly expository. Even so, I thought the story was very fun and one of those books where I kept saying I would read 5 more pages before bed, and then 50 pages later ...

Grade: A
Recommended: To people who like books in which the town itself is one of the characters, convoluted family tree mysteries, and lake monsters.