The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

I really wanted to like this book but I just could not get into it.
The positive, the story set up is great, the negative, the characters stay too flat for the amount of time this book covers. Everytime you think that there is development, there is a huge time jump and everything is is set to zero again.

spoiler- I found it strange that we did not find out more how Sam reacted to Bacon's death but we get a long inside Joe's mind when his dog needs to be killed. On the other hand again his whole ptsd from killing the German scientist is getting glanced over, just that he had it. /spoiler ( )

Wow. Truly an epic disguised as something small. ( )

I'm conflicted on this story. The beginning was good, the ending was great but the middle was just so-so. It was like I ran into a brick wall int he middle of the book and I couldn't get around or through it. But towards the end, I got caught back up in the story again. I loved the comics angle and the relationship between Sam and Joe and would have liked to have seen more of that. Despite how much I disliked the middle, I could still see that Michael Chabon has talent and he can craft a sentence. He's a magnificent writer. If you decide to read this book and you, like me, get bogged down in the middle, just skip to the last 100 pages or so and finish the book from there. ( )

This book hovered between a 3 and a 3.5 star rating for me. I originally rated it as 4 stars but when I sat back and thought of the book as a whole, I realized it was closer to 3 stars/ It started out really slow and put me in a reading slump for over a month and I had to find an audiobook version to get through it. I thought the writing style was difficult to follow and unnecessarily complicated which turned me off of it a bit.

The characters were pretty good. I started out liking Joe but I liked him less as the book went on and I didn't care much for Sammy at first but grew to like him a lot toward the end. I didn't like that he decided to move to L.A. in the end. though. Tommy was really cool and so was Rosa.

The story was mostly kind boring and dragged on a lot but it had some good points. My favorite parts were when Sam and Joe were coming up with the comic book characters and when they were all together in the end.

As a major comic book geek I also liked all of the background and mentions of familiar comic books so that was cool. The book was clearly well researched and did feel realistic.

Overall I'd have to say the book was ok. Not life changing and probably not reread worth unless I'm desperate but I don't regret reading it at all.
( )

Read a quarter of it and it's mostly filler. Vast tracts about nothing to do with anything, not beautifully written and no respect for the reader's time.

Maybe if it had been compressed to 2/3 of the length, there's (maybe) some good stuff in there, but of what I read there was nothing great and most was slightly clumbsy, slightly ham-fisted like "this'll make a good story" (not).

I can't believe the 5-star ratings. This was really nothing to me. I'm glad I gave up. ( )