I think what I love most about this book was its casual magic. The fantastic beasts, human and otherwise, populating this novel are always believable. You can't help but be dragged into Willie Upton's world with its ghosts and family secrets. ( )

I enjoyed this book, although I'm not sure if everyone would like it. It is based around a girl who comes back to her small town and learns that some things she thought to be true were not. It was a little hard to start, but if you keep reading it does become very interesting. I also thought some of the chapters about her ancestors and the history of the town were very slow and I couldn't always follow who they were talking about and how they were related to the main character. I was also hoping for more tie ins with the monster, but he really only was talked about in the beginning and the end. Although some parts were hard to get through when I finished the book I felt very satisfied and had nothing but good thoughts about it. I'd recommend this book to anyone who is up for a very different kind of book and willing to take the slow paced chapters with the fast paced ones. ( )

Summary: Willie Upton, a graduate student in archaeology, returns home to Templeton, New York for the summer. Templeton should be welcoming - it's a small town, and Willie is the last descendant of the town's founder - but it's not quite the homecoming that she'd imagined, for Willie is pregnant with her (married) advisor's child. Neither is the town quite the same: on the day she returns home, the corpse of a giant monster surfaces in Lake Glimmerglass, simultaneously throwing the town into an uproar and casting a strange pall over the inhabitants. To make matters worse, Willie's mother Vi lets slip that Willie's father is not an anonymous San Franciscan hippie, but is in fact someone from Templeton itself. Obsessed with figuring out her parentage while avoiding the truth about her current situation, Willie digs into her family tree, which is also the history of a town, and discovers more than one secret buried in time.

Review: The number one word I have seen connected with this book is "ambitious", and it's certainly apt. Groff tries to do a *lot* with this book - multiple voices, multiple periods of history, epistolary portions, sprawling family trees, sprinkles of magical realism, incorporation of James Fenimore Cooper's famous characters as real people, a coming-of-age story, and more. Ambitious, no doubt, particularly for a first novel... but the thing is, she pulls most of it off. I think she particularly did a nice job with creating distinct, believable voices for each chapter, regardless of the narrating character's sex, age, or historical milieu. I did have a little bit of a problem as to how all of the pieces fit together into the novel - some are documents that Willie finds during the course of her research, but many are not, and the context in which illiterate characters are speaking to us as a reader is never clear. I almost would have preferred that *none* of the historical sections had been presented as actual documents (and they are, too, often with photos, family trees, or page edges drawn around the words), rather than half in context and half without.

I've never read any James Fenimore Cooper, so I have no idea how well those elements are worked in, but Templeton as a thinly-veiled Cooperstown is excellently drawn. At first I was a little confused as to why Groff didn't just call it Cooperstown and be done with it, the veil is so thin, but as I read I realized by tweaking it just a little out of reality, she can play with the history, play with the people who inhabit it, and add in lake monsters and firestarters and all sorts of things without offending anyone. Groff's writing style (when she's not writing "in voice") is fluid, fancy, and easily readable, of the sort that skirts along the border of lyrical without ever quite tipping over into pretentious, and it excellently sets the mood for the rest of the story.

Overall, even though all of the pieces didn't fit together quite as solidly as I would have hoped, each of the pieces in and of itself was well-done. I found it very easy to get absorbed in this book, and thoroughly enjoyable throughout. I'll definitely be keeping my eye out for what Groff produces in the future. 4 out of 5 stars.

Recommendation: I think people who normally read either literary fiction or historical fiction will enjoy this book, particularly folks for whom large family trees are like literary candy. However, while I didn't find the magical realism elements to be out of place or distracting, if the phrase "lake monster" sends you screaming for the hills, then maybe you're best suited looking elsewhere. ( )

I enjoyed reading the book, but several things bothered me. I didn't always read all the past history subplots. The book also refers heavily on James Fenmore Cooper, but changes many details. And the end is tied up too neatly for my taste. ( )

A little tough to keep the family trees straight, but really rewarding at the end. Very clever and interesting story. ( )

I just didn't like this book as much as others. I love genealogy and that is what drew me. I think it was the going back and forth in time and among the characters - even though I haven't had a problem with that in previous books. I just never felt pulled in and I am not sure why. I found it just OK - mildly interesting. ( )

This is a strange novel, one I picked up at a whim and wasn't expecting to like very much, and I don't think it's immediately obvious from the cover and blurb what an odd little hybrid it is. On the surface, it is a family-saga type novel: Wilhelmina Upton, PhD candidate and all-round smart girl, has returned to her childhood home town, Templeton, NY, having had an affair with her supervisor, got pregnant and then tried to run over his wife with a bush plane. On the same day, the body of a monster is discovered in the lake, and Willie's mother, Vivienne, tells her that her father, long supposed to be a passing hippie in a San Francisco commune, isn't who she always thought he was. It's as funny, and bittersweet, as it sounds.

But it's necessary to understand that Templeton, while fictional, has more reality than most fictional places - it is the name given by James Fenimore Cooper to Cooperstown when he wrote about his home town, and in the same way, the author writes an odd mix of history and epistolary fiction, grounding her story of family in the notes and papers of the past. The result is interesting: it's sad, funny and engaging. It's flawed: it has a tendency to bring in important plot threads and quietly forget about them a few hundred pages later, and the unfolding of the history can get a little convenient at times, but it does engage.

And for something that could also be described as 400 pages of Last of the Mohicans fanfiction, it's good fun. ( )

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. ( )

Where to start... I loved this book and found it totally engrossing toward the end. Although it is mostly told in the voice of Willie Upton, a girl with her own troubles and a mystery to figure out. Who is her father? This leads her to look through her family tree and with that the history (and scandals) of one of the most prominent families in her town. Sometimes the chapters are written by people in the past in their voices which can be confusing, but the mystery was fun and not always pre...more Where to start... I loved this book and found it totally engrossing toward the end. Although it is mostly told in the voice of Willie Upton, a girl with her own troubles and a mystery to figure out. Who is her father? This leads her to look through her family tree and with that the history (and scandals) of one of the most prominent families in her town. Sometimes the chapters are written by people in the past in their voices which can be confusing, but the mystery was fun and not always predicable. Although I enjoyed this book, I would not know who to recommend it to, it is so different of a novel, and is really complex due to its several story lines. ( )

Willie Upton, a PhD student, returns home following the end of an affair with her profesor. While there, her mother admits for the first time that Wilie's father is a citizen of their small town. Willie reseaches her family's past in an attempt to discover who her father is.

This book is a blend of many types of stories. It is part magical realism with a ghost and a Loch Ness type monster in a lake. It has a large dose of historical fiction, and is also partly a modern day story of relationships.

Along with the blend of types of stories, there is a large cast of characters, both modern and historical. I found myself drawn into the many individual stories. The author has done a good job of linking them together in a very ambitious plot. ( )

Congratulations to Lauren Groff on publishing such a full and thought-provoking novel. Templeton's first and foremost monster dies in the lake by the little village - goes belly-up and, being the size of a bus, is winched up on the dock and sheltered from the sun by a canopy. Of course, the title has a plural noun, but I didn't find anyone else in the book particularly monstrous, at least in the present.

Groff unfolds a historic backdrop for Templeton's current cast - complete with a long story on the town's founder and a family tree. These are the real monsters, I guess. There are more rogues here than you can count; there's also insanity, serial murder, serial arson, more children born out of wedlock than within it. And that brings us to Willie Upton, the story's heroine, who undertakes a quest to find her father among the town's affable men in the generation before her.

"The Monsters of Templeton" is a noble effort - full and mature. I felt the tiniest bit like it lacked a focus - diverting descriptions, unnecessary plot directions - and became indistinct. It's a terrific first effort, make no mistake, but if Ms. Groff comes out with subsequent work that's praised, you'd do all right to start with that. ( )

This is a very well written book. It combines the history of a town as well as a twisted and intriguing family history. It is a captivating story that has a hint of science fiction (monsters) that I didn't expect, but very much enjoyed. The book is definitely a page turner, and when I finished I wished that the book wasn't over. ( )

I would love to write some big long in depth analysis of this book but really if your reading this and you haven't read the book...... stop reading this, get into you transportaion(car, bus, friends car, bike, chevrolegs.. whatever) go to the library/book store and get this book. It's not some life changing awe inspiring though put to ink. But I have to say that it is a fantastic book and a strange one. It's on my definate re-read list. Check it out. ( )

When Willie Upton suddenly returns to her hometown of Templeton, New York, a dead monster rises to the surface of the lake. That’s how Lauren Groff’s debut novel, The Monsters of Templeton, begins, but lake monsters aside, Willie’s story is pretty predictable, almost to the point of cliche. She and her mother have arguments that end in tears of anger or of happiness. Willie learns that the quirky people of her small town have great wisdom and are there to support her, even if she chose to leave them so many years ago. Not a bad sort of story, but stories like this don’t often set my world on fire.

Two things set this novel apart from other sentimental small-town fiction: the magical elements and the historical narrative. The magical elements–the lake monster and the family ghosts–are little more than plot devices. They never feel fully integrated into the rest of the book. The one time a spirit acts to influence the plot, it seems to merely be a deus ex machina because until that moment we’re never given any reason to think the spirits behave in this way. I love magical realism, but this is magical convenience, at least in the present-day story.

The historical elements are somewhat more successful because they are better integrated into the overall story, and the magical elements are put to better use in the historical section as well. As Willie investigates her family’s history, she reads letters and other documents that are reproduced in the novel. Some of the letters and documents are quite entertaining, but the cumulative effect is less than astounding. There just seem to be a few too many amazing occurances and a few too many odd characters for one family.

This novel has some clever elements, but the whole thing doesn’t quite hang together. Here, we have a rather sappy novel about family and small-town relationships paired with an epic reimaging of one town’s history. I probably wouldn’t even pick up the first book, and the second would have worked better as a series of related short stories along the lines of Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. (The short story approach would have the advantage of not requiring the reader to understand all the ties, and it would allow some of the characters to exist in the world of Templeton without being directly connected to the Templeton family.)

There’s some good stuff here. I’m just hoping Groff has more good stuff left and that she learns to spread it out over multiple books instead of packing it into one. She’d serve her talent better that way.

See my complete review at my blog. ( )

This is an ambitious book--multiple POV's, time periods covered, fake books and letters and all sorts of other things like a Loch Ness-esque monster. It took me a while to get used to it, as you know, I'm currently very sensitive to POV shifts and they generally make me angry. But here they worked (mostly because they didn't happen within chapters). The characters were flawed and deep. I also am generally annoyed by the "who is my father" quest kind of stories...but again, didn't bother me as much here as it often does. I think I was just really impressed with the writing here and the scope of the book. It's hard to pull off and she did a good job. ( )

Well-written! Groff attacks her story from so many angles that I'm sometimes not sure of the quickest way to describe it; yet, I can surely say that it is incredibly well-written.

"Willie" reluctantly returns home to Templeton (Cooperstown) after a love affair gone wrong while in Alaska working on her Ph. D. The very same day that Willie returns home, an incredibly large monster is found dead in the lake near her home. In addition to the mystery of the monster found in the lake, Willie is confronted with the mystery of the identity of her father. (This puts the lake monster on the backburner for awhile.) Willie puts her schooling to work and unearths numerous finds regarding the founding fathers of her hometown.

Ghosts, murder, monsters, ancestry, and a wonderful way with words! ( )

Monsters has a rough start, I found it hard to get through the first few chapters. The reason pushed through the first chapters is my affinity for Cooperstown, NY. I've spent a lot of time in Cooperstown and was delighted to read about a town in which I have very fond memories.

Besides the monster in Glimmerglass lake, the main monsters in the Monsters of Templeton are the deep dark family secrets that we all have. Willie, our protagonist, suddenly returns home to Templeton (Cooperstown, NY) from the Alaskan tundra due to being caught in an affair. She returns home pregnant and learns that she wasn't conceived in a love orgy, but her real father lives in Cooperstown. Willie searches for her real father and uncovers deep dark secrets about her family line, and about herself. ( )

Bon roman américain dans lequel une jeune femme regagne sa petite ville natale et se met à chercher l’identité de son père, se plongeant pour l’occasion dans l’histoire de la ville depuis ses origines. ( )

This book received a lot of positive reviews, and has been highlighted as great for book group discussions. There was a lot I liked about this book, but it just didn't come together as a whole for me. Although I often like books that have fantastical elements, the ghost in this book felt contrived. I liked the descriptions of the ancient, mysterious lake monster, but it didn't feel integrated sufficiently with the story as a whole. I liked but didn't love many of the characters. (I found it hard to believe that Willie wasn't furious with her mother for casually telling her that she had been lying about who her father might have been, and for withholding his identity -- yeah, I know she was handing this challenge to her as a way to get her out of a funk -- but it felt a bit too unbelievable and contrived to me.) The historical characters were interesting, and I liked the secrets that were discovered. Maybe my problem with the book is that I felt she tried to do too much with it. Too many themes and tangents. ( )

I truly enjoyed this novel, which is good considering I didn't really like the main character Willie Upton. Something about her was off to me, but her trying to solve the genealogical puzzle of who is her father was intriguing. The monster in the lake added some strange whimsy to the story which might not have worked without it.

Generations of Templeton, New York residents (and all their deeds) are illuminated in the research of the most recent member of the Temple/Averill family, Wilie Upton, to find the identity of her father. Part historical novel, part a discussion of place (Templeton is a thinly veiled Cooperstown, NY), part study on the human condition, Groff pulls in the reader, who is as eager to discover the identity of the mysterious father as Willie. Throw in the discovery of the town's "lake monster," and the book is quite a literary fantasy! ( )