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The Great Night (2011)

by Chris Adrian(Favorite Author)

3.19 of 5 Votes: 4

ISBN

0374166412 (ISBN13: 9780374166410)

languge

English

genre

Fantasy

publisher

Farrar Straus Giroux

review 1: I thought The Children's Hospital was impressively ambitious and imaginative but maybe didn't quite come off. Also, I really wanted to hate Chris Adrian, because he's one of those people who's all, 'Eh, I guess I'll go to medical school AND the Iowa Writer's Workshop, and then be a doctor AND publish multiple highly acclaimed novels, and, what the hell, might as well go to Harvard Divinity School and win a Guggenheim while I'm at it, all by the time I'm 35, NBD.' But I have since decided that I'm buying whatever he's selling -- I love his creativity, his sense of humor, and almost everything about the way he writes, with the minor quibble that all of his charcters somehow come off really similarly, and I think it might be because he distinguishes them with a lot of aggress... moreively unique quirks and colorful background stories, and turns out that's maybe not really character development. The best section of this book is the chapter with the faeries in the cancer ward. That's the sort of writing he does best, and it's amazing. The rest of the book is pretty good, but not brilliant like that bit is.
review 2: While flawed, this book is flawed at the highest level. There were bits and pieces I didn't like or that I didn't think worked, but I mean that in the same sense one might talk about something like 'Shakespeare's lesser works': the worst one is still right on the money. With this qualification in mind, here's my review:This is a beautiful book. If you read it, you will be moved. Promise.**One further qualification. There's a lot of sexual content in the book, which I know that some people can find distracting. I would only point out that it is all presented, and I mean literally every instance, in an emotional context. The respective passages are not pornographic, anatomical descriptions of who does what to whom, but rather who does what and why. less

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