I wanted to like this book so much. The description sounded great and there were some moments of true brilliance - I did actually like Buddy. But it just felt like utter hard work. I didn’t like Marty’s masturbatory obsession with Malice. I didn’t like the family patriarch who was also creepy. And I just didn’t care about the family as a whole. It just didn’t grab me alas and in the end I realised I was actively avoiding reading it. I am so disappointed!

So, the beginning of the book was a little different to how I had imagined it might start. Spoonbenders was based around some great ideas, but I'm not sure that they translated as well as they could have for me.

This was a quirky and utterly eccentric story that engaged me from beginning to end. Strongly character led, I found myself charmed by the Amazing Telemachus family. It won't be for everybody but I loved this hilarious family saga.

⭐️⭐️⭐️ 3 stars

Where to start?! The opening of the book and the masturbation scene made me think ‘Erm what?!’

This is a slow burner, flitting all over the place.

The premise of the super powers of the family was interesting but for me it just wasn’t rounded out and felt a bit mixed up.

I think the author has promise and I would read another by him.

It tool me ages to read finish this book, and at one point I felt I'd be better after being refreshed by reading a Cathy Kelly that I knew I would enjoy
I'd read glowing reviews about how funny this book was. but I just couldn't get it.
I was unable to switch to the author's mindset, it being both very American and very male.
Certain passages started to be interesting only for the next sentence to be set in a different time and location, this I found frustrating at first and then pain annoying.
After slogging though to the end I am afraid it remains something I just could not get

I took a punt on this book when I probably usually wouldn't have. I'm not really interested in American family life but to be fair the Telemachus family are not your average American family, not by a long shot. Matty Telemachus and his mum have just moved into her old family home, it's a once great family ruined by one fateful tv appearance, that went so humiliatingly wrong it broke them apart, and the loss of their much loved and very talented mother. Matty begins to learn more about that night, his strange uncle Buddy, his con man grandfather and his very odd family and then himself when he starts to feel a bit odd too.
This book was so interesting to me, trying to work out who had special powers and whether that really made them special or not? Most of all though, this was just a really good book about family, the ups and downs, the fights and feuds and the way you love them even after all that.

Is it so great to have psychic powers in your everyday life? How do you build meaningful relationships when you can tell when people are lying to you? How do manage with a power you can only trigger in a very ... private ... way, but still feel compel to use? How do you make do with a regular life when you had a brush with fame and power? How do you handle remembering your future, up until its final day? How do you deal with those problems when the government and the mob come meedling in your life? That's a Daryl Gregory story for you, people. Gregory takes a supernatural premice, spin several plot lines converging toward a, explosing final, but never forgets that it's people he is talking about, with feelings and issues that go beyond some angry mobsters and shady government agencies. It's a great read if you like fun stories with cons and multiple plotlines, and so much heart and affection for its characters.

I was really looking forward to a hilarious family drama instead this book was trite and just not my cup of tea. The humour hardly worked for me and the plot as a whole was really predictable and didn't manage to grab my attention.

Spoonbenders is a novel brimming with wonderful ideas but doesn’t quite manage to land them.

The Telemachuses are a family of psychics. Each has their own, special psychic power. Together, they used to be TV stars until, in one unfortunate programme, their psychic moving of a table seemed to be attributable to the sole of a shoe rather than the soul of the psyche. So we meet them, one by one, in separate point of view sections, using their special powers for both mundane and clandestine activity.

When it works well, it works very well. Matty travels in space to spy on his bodacious cousin Mary Alice (Malice). Irene uses her power to detect lies to have a little fun at a job interview. There are attempts to crack safes and control roulette balls.

But when it doesn’t work so well, it can be a bit of a trudge. There’s all sorts of stuff with the CIA (or is It FBI?) with bluff and counter-bluff. Too often this is used as a convenient way to rescue out protagonists from impossible situations. And there’s Buddy, whose time travelling just makes an already choppy plot that much harder to follow. The ideas that carried the first half of the book start to feel tired.

One of the real problems I had as a reader was keeping the various familial relationships straight. There were just too many Telemachuses at too many (non-linear) points in time. This, in turn, made an intricate plot just too hard to follow.

This sounds awfully negative, and honestly the end of this longish book did sometimes feel quite far away. But it is worth reading, or at least starting, to get those fizzy ideas of what everyday life might look like with access to genuine psychic ability.

There is something about superhero stories that capture the imagination. When written well, the genre can examine the human condition in as many different ways as there are possible superpowers.

This is exactly what makes ‘Spoonbenders’ so provocative in its dissection of humanity and family. It could have easily gone down the predictable, dull path of world-ending stakes and super villains – and indeed, the potential for this is frequently teased. Instead, the world of superpowered individuals is explored on a private level, allowing for a much more insightful look at how the once-great Telemachus family copes in day-to-day life.

Each member of the superpowered family appears irrevocably broken. The lie-detecting daughter lacks complete trust, the future-predicting son is weighted with responsibility – and yet it is this struggle with their flawed nature in life’s seemingly insignificant moments that is utterly compelling.

Matty is our gateway into this world. Like us, Matty starts as an outsider who only knows of his family’s great history through nostalgic tellings and re-tellings of their golden age. His beloved grandmother, Maureen, passed away long before the main events of the narrative, but the flashbacks are so frequent and her role so significant that she may as well be considered a main character.

The connection between the two of them is strong but nuanced. Not only do Matty and Maureen display similar powers, but they also both represent the best in the family – the optimism, the independence, the naïve curiosity – while everyone else is absorbed in their own life problems.

But this isn’t to say that the family’s issues aren’t important. Irene’s lie detecting leads her to the world of online dating where she can remain blissfully unaware of suitors’ white lies, and when she finally gets the opportunity to meet the man of her dreams she must confront her own deeply rooted insecurities.

This is where Gregory’s novel excels. By having chapters that individually address each main character’s thoughts and emotions, we are granted exclusively intimate moments into the minds of “superheroes” – characters who we usually expect to be free of day-to-day stress. And once we get a grasp of each character’s role in the storyline, it is equally rewarding to see the connectedness and isolation of a family bound by nostalgia.

Daryl Gregory has weaved a narrative that is in is in equal parts mentally engaging and emotionally rewarding. This is particularly surprising for a story that proposes such a campy premise. While some plot points of Spoonbenders are not examined to their full potential, Gregory’s ability to construct believable, intriguing characters within the confines of the superhero genre is a wonderful thing to behold.

6.5/10

A unique novel and not similar to anything I’ve read before, I was looking forward to this for a while and the concept of the plot was intriguing to say the least. However, I found the idea better than the execution and was never able to fully absorb myself into it. This could partly be blamed down to me and how tired I’ve been of late (parenthood!) or in part to do with how little I was invested in the story.

The narrative switches not only perspectives but times. There are a number of characters that we read about and the differing timelines which shape the characters. For me the only character I really wanted to delve further into was Teddy, the dad. He was the most complicated character with a bit of a gruff exterior to those who know him best but is always looking at angles. We see into his past and how events shaped his life. The others just weren’t as interesting to read about and I was least interested to read Buddy’s segments (even though that linked nicely together at the end).

There were decent parts to this book, I enjoyed the majority of it but never felt I was desperate to read on and find out what happened. I wouldn’t hesitate to try some of the author’s other work though as I think he’s come up with a good idea here and wrote it well, it just didn’t fully work out for me is all.

I had never heard of Daryl Gregory before reading this book, but having read Spoonbenders, I definitely plan to explore more of his work. This was a fabulous, tightly plotted and heart-warming story about the Telemachus family.
Do they have psychic abilities? Are they frauds and conmen? Remote viewing? Moving objects? Lie detectors? Seeing the future? How can the family pull together to change their fate and fortune?
Recommended.

This isn’t a book that I immediately loved from the moment I opened it up. Indeed, it took me a while to warm to some of the characters as we learn how each of this uniquely talented family copes with their gifts in multiple third person viewpoint – though I use the word gifts loosely as their abilities seem more of a curse. Teddy, the patriarch, is the only family member reasonably content and he is without any true talent and compensates by being a consummate sleight-of-hand con artist. Nonetheless we learn that in the past, even Teddy has paid an appalling price for using his fast-fingered tricks with the wrong people.

Everyone else in the Telemachus family are struggling. They all were dealt a major blow when Teddy’s wife and their mother, Maureen, died of cancer far too young. Buddy and Irene have never truly recovered. However, their problems go well beyond plain grief for the one parent who could truly understand their unique viewpoint. Gregory’s intuitive and accomplished writing demonstrates all too clearly the horror of enduring a slice of the future in the middle of a daily routine – particularly as Buddy only seems to get these insights when a family member is under some threat. The effort and trauma involved has caused him to fall silent as he battles to sift exactly what is going on and how he can nudge the outcome. Irene has found her personal life become a battleground, making it difficult to live alongside anyone as the minute they don’t tell her the truth, she knows. While Frankie can sometimes move small objects – and sometimes he can’t…

As events stack up against each family member, the tension increases as the stakes become ever higher, transforming Spoonbenders into a real page-turner despite being almost afraid to power through to the end, as I was convinced it was going to be a heartbreaker… I certainly didn’t see the final denouement coming and was impressed at the ingenuity and skill Gregory demonstrates in bringing this story to a fitting conclusion. Highly recommended.

While I obtained the arc of Spoonbenders from the publisher via NetGalley, this has in no way influenced my unbiased review.
9/10

A dysfunctional family tale, with psychic powers. Enough said! This was such a great book to read, both for plot and character. It tells the story of the Amazing Telemachus Family, a once renowned and now debunked family of psychics, telekinetics and mind readers and their on-going trials and tribulations. Throw in the mob and shady government organisations, internet dating and pinball and you have a wonderful collage of a book that is chock full of wit and heart without ever becoming schmaltzy. Each chapter focuses on one member of the family and we learn all about their past and their present through these vignettes. There is a plot that runs loosely through the narrative, but it is only at the fantastic climax that all of the plot threads are finally drawn together and you realise just how clever the author is to have constructed such an intricate spiderweb without you even noticing. The prose is clean and concise and the characters are really well drawn. I loved Buddy - he is a wonderful creation and there is part of me that would love a Buddy spin off. Overall I really enjoyed this book and would recommend it to those who enjoyed A Prayer for Owen Meeny.

https://lynns-books.com/2017/07/18/spoonbenders-by-daryl-gregory/
I loved this book, it’s my first by this author but on the strength of this one I’m keen to go and check out more of his work. To be honest I wasn’t sure if this would be for me, it doesn’t really sound like there’s going to be much fantasy and I must admit that when I started the book it reads like a contemporary family saga, and yet there is so much more to this as I soon found out. Within the first few pages I was intrigued by the Telemachus family, they worked their magic on me and pretty soon I was tearing through the pages desperate to know what came next. A clever story, full of emotion, great characterisation and laugh out loud moments. Imagine the dysfunctional Royal Tenenbaums, but with psychic abilities thrown into the mix, meets the Sopranos. Magic, the mob, a sprinkling of love and a twisting over arching storyline that will keep you gripped. What’s not to love?

The Telemachus family have psychic abilities. For a brief spell during the 1970s they looked set to achieve fame as the whole family appeared on tv, each using their abilities for a different act to wow the audience. Unfortunately things didn’t quite pan out and the family retreated home in shame and this incident, followed fairly soon afterwards by family loss, left them all wanting little more than to live normal lives. Now jump forwards approximately 20 years and witness the family as they all struggle with their own problems and witness the absurdly crazy events as they spiral further and further into the genius that makes up the grand finale of this story.

This is a story that jumps back to the past, allowing plot lines of espionage and the Cold War to creep in, but also jumps forward into the future (depending on whose storyline you’re currently reading) so that you can glimpse intriguing snippets of what is yet to come. I was so impressed, in fact more than impressed, staggered at the way this story comes together. There are so many plates spinning here that I was on the edge of my seat waiting for the inevitable crash, which, unbelievably, never came. This truly is a masterfully told story and on top of that its tense with anticipation, I was reading and alternately shaking my head or nodding or laughing or just plain wanting to jump to the conclusion to kill the suspense!

What really shines for me in this story are the characters. All of them are so well rounded. You know that you’re in love with a character when you find yourself wishing you could meet them or be part of what they’ve got going on and as crazy as the Telemachus family is I found that to be the case here, and not just with one character but them all. The father is Teddy. He’s the one exception to the rule as he has no psychic ability at all. He’s a conman, even down to his made up Greek heritage and yet he manages to marry the woman of his dreams after he was wowed by her at their first meeting. Call it love at first sight if you will. Maureen is probably one of the world’s greatest psychics and all of her children inherited some form of ability from her. Irene is the human lie detector, Frankie can move objects and Buddy can predict the future. Sounds almost too good to be true and yet at the start of the story their strange abilities have not prevented them from free falling into dire straits. Irene is now bringing up her son Matty alone, cash problems have forced her to return to the family home and she’s working long hours, in a job that she doesn’t enjoy, for minimum pay. Frankie’s own company has gone bust. He’s working hard but he has massive debts and has found himself in over his head with the mob. And Buddy, well, he seems to have retreated into his own world, he very rarely talks and is constantly working on ‘projects’ of his own that are unfathomable to everyone else. Now add in the next generation and all their mixed emotions, especially the teenagers and their own budding talents that are just becoming apparent. Between them they gave me moments of reflection a lot of entertainment, a number of laughs at the sagas of everyday life and genuine feelings for this oddball family.

I don’t really want to say too much more. I really liked that this is a standalone novel. I love that it has a storyline that seems to be playing second fiddle until it becomes apparent that it’s the key to the whole thing and I think there’s almost a message here about being careful what you wish for. The Telemachus family are all talented but their own special abilities have not led them to be happy, and in a world where people are constantly wishing to be the next supernatural, immortal or magical character that they read about I found this refreshingly different.

I’m probably not doing this book credit so I’ll finish by saying, if you’re reading this review and it hasn’t convinced you to pick this up, then ignore everything I’ve said and pick it up anyway. I simply can’t imagine anyone not enjoying this book and I want everyone to give it a shot.

I received a copy from the publisher through Netgalley, for which my thanks. The above is my own opinion.

I really liked this book! So different than anything I've read before and the characters are so well written that by the end of the book it feels like you know them. A bit of a slow starter though and a little confusing being introduced to so many characters so quickly but don't give up as it's a great read.

A family of psychics is humiliated on national television; their powers questioned and tricks exposed. However it seems that most of the family did actually have powers and this is the tale of how they made the most of or exploited their gifts.

An enjoyable story with a range of lovable, infuriating and complicated characters. I was confused a couple of times with the time travel, both within the story and by the characters, but everything came together at the end in not quite the way I had expected. Great read.

This book was very strange -which i was expecting! I mean com on! We are talking about a family that apparently is able to perform magic. So clearly it was going to be strange.

But it was too strange for me if that makes any sense.

I hated the opening scene of this book.
Which is not a good way to start a book for me! I do always have a hard time connecting to a book if the first few pages do not work for me! It just sets the tone for the entire book for me, and sadly in this one? It was not working for me!
But i am just not a big fan of being greeted with a masturbation scene where a male cousin gets off on watching his female cousin.
Because just... NO!

I am sorry but NO!
Can we please just finally move on from sexualising family members??


So that CLEARLY didn't work for me.
And while the rest of the story was okay, it was also quiet boring and moving in a way to slow pacing for me to really get invested into the story.

I liked Buddy, but the rest i was just not caring at all for.

I also wasn't really enjoying the constant switch between the characters because i always felt like the one i wanted to hear more about was just not getting enough pages!

The writing was okay, but once again nothing that kept sucking me back into the story, and since how the story was actually told wasn't really working for me, i can't say that i loved the writing.

And as i said, if i start a book and want to close it right away again because the start makes my interest go away in seconds? That book has to pack a BIG punch to actually impress me.

This was not doing that for me.

So sadly, this book didn't work for me.

If you like strange books and don't mind slow pacing and unnecessary many character points of views but pretty good writing?
give this a try.

If not... maybe stay away from this one.

I was very excited to see a new Daryl Gregory book, having loved his previous ones, especially Afterparty. This book was more fun and less menacing that his previous books. In the hands of a less talented writer the premise would be ridiculous, but he took me with him all the way. I loved every minute of this. Interesting characters, a quirky fun plot and so well written. I don't often give 5 star reviews, this book deserves it.