BookBrowse Review
BookBrowse
By presenting so many different characters diffusely spread through various styles of presentation, The Candy House reproduces the fundamental flaws that prevent social media from having the same truly deep and profound impact and connections to humanity that fiction can achieve. We end up with an innately dissatisfied feeling after having engaged with the stories and characters in the novel. As sensational and enjoyable as the plot, language, style and characters are at times, the same emptiness that follows a sugar high sets in quite quickly...continued
Full Review (652 words)
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(Reviewed by Jennifer Hon Khalaf).
Media Reviews
Entertainment Weekly
Its teeming tapestry of strivers, dropouts, and dreamers as insistently alive as they were 12 years ago… The Candy House, for all its dips and spins and cul-de-sacs, its brain- weevil gadgets and future panics, does what only the best and rarest books can: peel back the thin membrane of ordinary life, and find transcendence on the other side.
Good Housekeeping
You don't have to read A Visit From the Goon Squad to love this sibling novel to Egan's stellar hit...complex and intimate.
Houston Chronicle
The Candy House is bursting with stories, thick with beating hearts…[Egan's] writing still dazzles.
Los Angles Times
This is the thrill of both Goon Squad and Candy House: They exploit this new and strange material, but their greatest pleasures feel particular to books... For Egan, getting it right has to do with fulfilling a reader's craving — the word 'craving' appears in the first line of Candy House and the last chapter of Goon Squad — for mystery and imagination, as opposed to the barrage of information, the much emptier imagistic titillations, that we find much easier to access.
Oprah Daily
Inventive, effervescent...Egan plaits multiple narratives and techniques to underscore the manifold ways our own desires betray us in a brave new coded world.
Slate
Radiant…Egan opens windows on entrancing new worlds, in which what happened depends on who's telling the story.
Tampa Bay Times
Rich in indelible characters…full of humor and heartbreak and insight about our brave new world…Egan's subtle attention to the distinctive voices of her many characters is remarkable.
The New York Times
Sometimes…you pick up a novel and it makes your skin prickle — not necessarily because it's a great novel qua novel, which you can't know until the end, but because of the velocity of its microperceptions. You've entered elite head space of one kind or another. Jennifer Egan's new one, The Candy House, is one of these novels.
The San Francisco Chronicle
This is a beautiful exploration of loss, memory and history, a not too subtle critique of what is lost when we live our lives online.
The Washington Post
Even in an era of boundless hype, Jennifer Egan's The Candy House has a legitimate claim on the title of Most Anticipated Book of the Year…[contains] a brilliant demonstration of the unquantifiable pleasures of great fiction.
Vogue
A dazzling feat of literary construction that belies the profound questions at its core: Does technology aid our sense of narrative or obscure it?
Booklist (starred review)
Haunting and often hilarious, this is a wondrous, riotously inventive work of speculative fiction that celebrates the power of the imagination in the face of technology that threatens to do our thinking for us...a top spring title with magnetic pull for Visit from the Goon Squad admirers and fans of smart, literary speculative fiction.
Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
As Manhattan Beach (2017) showed, Egan is perfectly capable of writing a satisfying traditional novel, but she really dazzles when she turns her formidable gifts to examining the changes to society and individuals wrought by the internet and social media...A thrilling, endlessly stimulating work that demands to be read and reread.
Library Journal (starred review)
A forceful, wonderfully fragmented novel of a terrifyingly possible future, as intellectually rigorous as it is formally impressive, and yet another monumental work from Egan.
Publishers Weekly (starred review)
An electrifying and shape-shifting story that one-ups its Pulitzer-winning predecessor...Twisting through myriad points of view, narrative styles, and divergent voices, Egan proves herself as perceptive an interpreter of the necessity of human connection as ever, and her vision is as irresistible as the tech she describes. This is Egan's best yet.
Reader Reviews
Sally
I read it twice
I never do this, but I read this book twice. The first time, I loved the language and the way new technology impacted old conflicts. The second time, I tried to understand how all the characters fit together. Both times were extremely rewarding. It'... Read More
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