Short, quirky, funny, easy to read. I probably missed some point she was trying to make but I had fun reading it. ( )

A story about a mysterious, reclusive author who suddenly disappears. Novey tells an interesting tale and, like many good books, leaves some of the final resolution up to the reader to fill in the blanks about what did or did not happen. A pretty good read. ( )

3.5 stars

I enjoyed Novey's writing style and her invocation of a steamy few days in Brazil, but the characters were too vaguely sketched out. I never quite bought or believed any of the relationships between the characters or their motivations. The imagery cleverly connects with the magical realism of South American literature, but those images were better realized than the book's characters or plot. ( )

Of the several hundred books in my library this stands out as one of the Favorites! ( )

I read this novel for the second time this weekend, and found it to be even more a pleasure than the first time I read it. The novel is propelled forward by a story that has the momentum of a thriller, but even so, interstitially, almost magically within this rapid-fire plot, Novey finds a way to explore many aspects of how great fiction happens: the role an author's life plays in her fictions; the relationship between author and editor; the gap between what is on the page and what the author meant to write; the need for privacy vs. the need for publicity; and the role of translation--both the literal act of translating one language to another, and also, the way readers translate marks on the page into meanings, through the act of reading them. The novel beautifully answers the question: why read? ( )