Having read and liked a couple of others by Egan lately, I delved back to her early work. From the beginning, this one was sluggish and just felt really uninspired to me. It was a labor to get through, and I found myself skimming at times just to advance toward the end. The prose was fine but not beautiful, and the story just didn't land for me. If this had been my first Egan, I doubt I'd have read more. ( )

A wonderful novel detailing one woman's search for the truth behind her sister's suicide. In the process she grows up and faces some uncomfortable truths about her family's past. On her journey through Europe, retracing her sisters steps, she comes to terms with the fact that "truth" is not always a "fun" thing... ( )

I fought this book for a while. I'm not sure why. My goal was to reject it. A first novel--I'm too good for that, I thought. The 60s! I lived through that--there's nothing left to say about it. In the end, I lost the fight.

Phoebe starts off stuck in a familiar place, thinking she's the only one who's ever been there and simultaneously thinking she's never been anywhere. It's the kind of angst which has no solution inside of its self-definition. She goes looking in the totally wrong direction for relief--thinking there was somewhere outside of herself she needed to get to. What she finds is both unpredictable and inevitable. There! I didn't spoil anything!

Unlike many novels, films, tv shows, the psychology of the characters never seemed false, or only put there to make the story work. I believed everyone and everything. The tricks I expected to find, the places where I could point my finger and say, "nice plot device," freeing me from the spell, were absent. I was forced to go along with Phoebe on her quest, even as the other characters tried to stop her. We all failed. Like Phoebe, we are survivors so we had to fail and then we had to figure out what to do with our failure. Ms. Egan took the risks and didn't fail. ( )

Think The Lovely Bones, but from the perspective of a living, and seriously disturbed, bratty youngest child. Jennifer Egan's novel might have been written first, but I know which I prefer.

Phoebe O'Connor is eighteen in late 1970's San Francisco, living with her widowed mother and trying to deal with the death of her idolised older sister, Faith. After learning a few home truths, Phoebe sets off on a lone trip to Europe, tracing Faith's last steps and seeking either ghosts or answers. In Germany, she runs into her sister's old boyfriend, nicknamed 'Wolf', who agrees to join Phoebe's pilgrimage to the Italian cliffs where Faith fell to her death. The two fall into a depraved physical relationship, shagging constantly for a good quarter of the book I could have lived without, before Wolf decides to tell Phoebe more uncomfortable revelations about her sister.

Phoebe is desperately unlikeable from the start, selfish and immature, but I found the first, San Francisco-based part of the story still quite easy and interesting to read. Then Phoebe throws a tantrum because her mother tells her that (a) her father, who was obsessed with Faith, was actually a terrible amateur artist, and (b) she's fallen in love with her boss and finally moving on with her life, putting the family home on the market, and the whole novel started sliding down hill from there. There's a trite, 'finding religion' passage, a 'taking acid' stream of consciousness chapter, wall to wall introspection, and then Wolf, who is obviously obsessed with the youthful mirror of the late love of his life. I telegraphed his 'confession' very early on, but all the blather about Faith's involvement in terrorism even managed to dampen that climax.

So, watch the film with Cameron Diaz for a potted version of this miserable tale, but otherwise I recommend reading The Lovely Bones or Tales of the City. ( )

The title refers partly to a Diggers' sponsored happening in late 1960s San Francisco, which was a strong influence on the book's characters Wolf and Faith. Faith is the dead older sister of the main character Phoebe, who, after graduating from high school in 1978, flies off to Europe following the trail of Faith's postcards from eight years before. The title also refers to the reverberations from the '60s felt as inner turmoil in younger brothers and sisters who weren't quite old enough to be there. This book was recommended to me by one of the organizers of this year's Ocean State Writers' Conference, which managed to snag Jennifer Egan to be the keynote speaker before she "beat out" Jonathan Franzen for this year's National Book Critics Circle award. ( )