Reviews
Turned out to be quite realistic and fairly pessimistic too. But a good read. I thought it would be lighter so the grittiness took me aback.
This was a very twisty read - Irish school boys, mythology, physics, some very funny, but also dark stuff mixed in. It rambles and shifts from character to character, in sense proving the string theory of it all.
I'm not really sure how I felt about this book. Though it kept me reading, I felt as though many of the plots lines were unnecessary, and that I could have done without a lot of the subplots which were intertwined with the main story. However, Murray's writing style was highly fascinating to me, and I very much enjoyed the stylistic risks he took with the novel. Overall, I enjoyed the book, but would recommend it only to someone who is willing to put up with a kind of slow read.
This was a very easy and fun read, which is not to say that it's all fun and games. Although it is a vastly different book from Gaddis's JR, I couldn't help at times thinking of Gaddis's book, which also treats of a flailing teacher and a puckish kid (not that any one kid in Skippy Dies is a direct match for JR). Although it's not kid lit, it didn't strike me as an especially grown-up book either; that is, while it made me think back to being a teenager and confronting the attendant problems, the book's treatment of grown-up problems didn't resonate a great deal with my experience. Which is fine. I don't need it to have done so, necessarily, though perhaps a better book would have done so (or maybe the reader's at fault here). At any rate, I really enjoyed this one. I've heard that Murray's first novel wasn't nearly as good as this one, but I'll be eager to see what he comes up with next.
I wish there were more stars I could give. It blew me away.
Took a very long time to get started, and only the last 100 or so pages really get going. The story was well thought through, just could have been more developed.
