It took awhile for me to get into, and I had to google the parable part so I felt more like what I knew was going on. This was extremely well written story, with bits of humor and good characterizations.

Sigh. Unfortunately, this is another book that I TRULY wanted to like, one I had high hopes for....and it just didn't do it for me. I couldn't find any part that I could actually say was "wickedly funny "; I couldn't relate or connect to the protagonist OR any secondary character; the plot bordered on unrealistic or unbelievable at times.... I just didn't love it. I didn't think the writing wa terrible, which is sadly the ONLY positive thing I can honestly say. It just wasn't my cup of tea, and try as I might, I couldn't finish it and abandoned it around 47 percent. I dislike giving negative feedback immensely, but I just couldn't connect to this book in any way. I won't review it anywhere else, because I learned long ago that if I don't have anything nice or productive to say, it behooves me to say nothing at all.

I wrote about this title on my blog and will submit details to the publisher in the next round of this process.

This was not “wickedly funny” to me. I loathed the protagonist from her first Pop Tart-obsessed musings and I found the book painful to read and abandoned it pretty quickly. I received a free copy of this book from the publisher.

My Thoughts: I love trying debut novels and I thought this book had a lot of promise. For the first couple of chapters, it seemed like I just might have been right, but then the book just went off the rails for me. This is a story about a young woman, Anna, who is struggling to complete her English dissertation. Really she’s struggling to even get started on it. Her idea is to write on the subject of talent and whether it’s born or bred into a person. She stumbles upon a woman related to a local author who also had thoughts on talent before he took his own life many years before. While all this seems like enough elements for a story, none were strong enough to hold my interest.

I think Talent was a case of a young author having too many ideas and trying to cram them all into a single book. The story stumbled over itself and just lost me. The inserts of the author’s “notebook” writings were just plain dull and went on for far too long. And, the Pop Tarts? A silly gimmick, that an editor should have eliminated. It pains me to pan a debut, but I just didn’t care for Talent.

Note: I received a copy of this book from Little, Brown & Company (via NetGalley) in exchange for my honest review. Thank you!

Talent is the story of a student named Anna. She is working on her dissertation, but she's stuck. By chance, she becomes friends with the niece of a famous writer. Anna decides to write about this writer. I get the concept, but the story is odd. It's confusing at times. It's a jab at higher education that isn't funny. The characters are flat and unlikable. Overall, I had no connection with this story. Unfortunately, I didn't care for Talent. Thanks to NetGalley for an arc in exchange for an honest review.

I don’t think it’s a surprise that I’m a huge English nerd. I also have a masters degree in the subject, so I was definitely intrigued by the synopsis of Talent. I can’t exactly identify with a dissertation being that difficult to write (my thesis was a lot different). To be fair, I honestly don’t think Anna’s experience is close to typical. I mean, I’m guessing most grad students don’t randomly run into the niece of a writer they admire who then becomes the subject of their dissertation.

I might have been able to suspend my disbelief over the plot, but what really prevented me from enjoying this book was the writing. I went into this book knowing nothing about Juliet Lapidos, but within just a few pages, I could tell she had probably had an MFA. (I wasn’t able to find definitive evidence online that it’s specifically an MFA, but she does have a master’s in English.) Now, there’s nothing bad about improving yourself with an advanced degree. But I’ve noticed that, often, MFAs tend to give writing a pretentious tone that I am not a fan of. Talent definitely suffered from “MFA syndrome”. This writing style is not something I personally enjoy reading, and I found it distracting. There is something to be said about simple writing that doesn’t try too hard, and, unfortunately, I think this story could have benefited more from that approach. However, I genuinely think this isn’t something that will bother most readers, so if the plot sounds interesting and you’re not sensitive to writing styles, you might enjoy this book.

While Talent definitely falls into the literary fiction camp, I did get some fairly strong You vibes. The first chapter reminded me quite a bit of Caroline Kepnes’s novel, and I wasn’t quite sure where this novel was going. Needless to say, it wasn’t quite as creepy. But I did enjoy the mystery. I thought it added another level to the story that made it a bit more fun to read.

Thank you @LittleBrown and @Netgalley for providing me a digital copy in exchange for my honest review.

TALENT by Juliet Lapidos follows a graduate student painfully working her way through her dissertation (and getting no where due to her lack of drive and constant need to eat Pop Tarts). She unknowingly runs into the niece of a famous author who coincidentally also went through years of writers block before his untimely death.
TALENT is presented to the reader as a "wickedly funny debut" novel. I am not sure who decided  to term this book in such a way, but I could not find one passage that forced me to make any spontaneous sounds of amusement. However, I can confidently say that the author did a great job writing this story. It was clever and well put together. I enjoyed how the sentences flowed and how she described each scenario. I see the potential in this author and I am intrigued to see how her craft develops.
]

Talent is about Anna, a PhD candidate in English, who is unable to complete her dissertation. Upon the advice of her adviser (chairman), she attempts to find a case study that will cement her assertions and help her advance her paper. Then, she fortuitously encounters a woman whose uncle was a well-known author and she has access to his notebooks. Those notebooks could be the answer to Anna’s dilemma.

I had high hopes for this book but it completely fell flat for me. I found the characters to be disagreeable and the portrayal of academics, PhD candidates and the road to a degree ugly – not satirical.

This book is touted as funny and sincere, but I did not find any of these traits in Talent. Rather, I found the characters to be pathetic, the story, interspersed with excepts from the “notebooks” to be confusing and (mostly) irrelevant, and an overall feeling of distress and anxiety. While graduate studies can be and usually are, stressful, they can also be a time when a student enjoys the learning process, their interactions with fellow students and faculty, and the realization of what the future may hold.

It would appear that one of the author’s objective is to poke fun at the idea of aspiring to a higher degree, as well as those who teach and conduct research. In doing so, she created characters that are distasteful and without many redeeming qualities. Even the adviser was given a less than ethical character and, while there are always some academics who are willing to toss a colleague or student under the bus, there are many more who spend an inordinate number of hours coaching, cheering on and mentoring their students in order to help them attain success.

In the end I have to wonder why Ms Lapidos wrote this book. To criticize higher education? To speculate on the meaning of “talent” or “success”? There are too many themes running through this book to make it an enjoyable or enlightening read for me.

Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for providing a copy of this book for review.

I’ll be including Talent by Juliet Lapidos in my February audiobook review column for the San Francisco Chronicle, which will run in print in the Sunday book section the first Sunday in February. My “five stars” means nothing — netgalley will not allow me to include feedback without also giving a star rating, so I five star everything I give feedback on. But I did enjoy the read.

I wanted to like this book, as I wanted to like its characters. Both fell flat with me when I tried to look deeper. It made me sad. I'm ok with that (or O period K period with it) but this had no pay off for me.

I was drawn to this book by the cover artwork and the premise that it involved books. The story began with the main character Anna Brisker on a supermarket line where a woman in a bright orange raincoat discovered her pockets were empty. My first thought was, "Did she borrow the raincoat from Ringo who wore that for The Beatles final concert on Apple headquarter's rooftop?" Anyway, Anna lent the money to the woman who promised she would pay it back that afternoon. Two weeks later, there was still no repayment check in the mail, so Anna walked around the town of New Harbor hoping to run into this mystery woman. Amazingly, she was wearing the eye-popping raincoat once again when Anna happened upon her. Anna didn't even realize that it was Christmas Day, perhaps because she was Jewish. The woman's name was Helen Langley. She had books piled all around her house along with leather for book binding. As it turned out, Helen was a book antiquarian...and famous author Frederick Langley's niece.

Anna is an English college graduate student, and her achilles heel is successfully producing her dissertation. Apparently, Anna's teachers and family all had big hopes and expectations of her, but Anna's inability to conclude her PhD degree has drawn skepticism from all parties. Her degree should have taken a minimum of five years, yet Anna was already halfway through her seventh. When Anna befriends Helen and discovers her relation to the famous and controversial author Frederick Langley, a light bulb goes off in her head: "Here is the topic I'll use for my dissertation; why did Frederick Langley suddenly stop writing?" There are two composition notebooks the famous author secretly left behind that might provide some clues.

I had a very strange experience I never had before while reading a book. From the first page I assumed that the main character was a man. Even though I found out (to my utter surprise) that it was in fact a woman named Anna, I still felt as though I were reading about a man all the way through to the book's end. Quite bizarre! The most endearing quality this character had was her penchant for fruit-filled Pop Tarts. Other than that, she was living in a very nice apartment thanks to the financial stipend left behind by Anna's deceased grandfather. I felt no emotional connection to this character, and it was sadly a lackluster read.

An entertaining, if rather slight,, novel about a graduate student who befriends the niece of a famous writer, hoping to find material for her thesis, and is pulled into a conspiratorial plot. A good satire of academia and literary circles, though it may have limited currency outside those circles. Quirky and likable.

Talent is a gorgeously written academic satire, focusing on floundering doctoral student Anna Brisker. Sadly, gorgeous writing is all Talent has, as its plot lands the satire but fails when it tries to make broader points about writing and people and life--so, you know, everything. It also, aside from Anna, suffers from character description syndrome, where (in this case, beautifully written) appearance (coat, shoes, lipstick, hair, state of general grooming, etc.) are meant to convey depth in the place of actual characterization.

Anna lives in New Harbor, Connecticut, working on her PhD in English at Collegiate University (a very thinly veiled Yale). She's working on her dissertation, a study of authors and inspiration. She doesn't believe in it, but despite her efforts (and increasing number of years that have seen her go from wunderkind to cautionary tale) she just can't seem to make her argument strong enough, can't seem to motivate herself to find a way to finish.

A chance encounter with Helen at the grocery store turns out to be the surprising spark Anna feels she's found, as Helen is the niece of Fredrick Langley, deceased minor writer renowned mostly for ceasing to write just as he started to become well known.

Certain that Fredrick's career holds the key to finishing her dissertation, Anna agrees to help Helen obtain notebooks Fredrick kept in the period just before he died--notebooks that Helen insists she's inherited but are held by Collegiate. But to be honest, none of this matters--it exists for Ms. Lapidos to sprightly and brightly savage academia, and that is where Talent works. But having a plot that doesn't ever find its point and characters that never approach the flesh level of fleshed out makes it too slight to hold the weight of what it wants to be.

Having said all that, Ms. Lapidos's writing is so beautiful that I would definitely love to read something more substantial from her.

An interesting debut novel about a graduate student struggling with her dissertation on the origins of artistic inspiration. “Relatives who’d once admired my precocity were beginning to wonder what was taking so long.” Her thesis advisor has told her to find a case study for her hypothesis. She stumbles across the niece of a well known short story author, Freddy Langley, someone who was prolific for a few years and then just stopped publishing. He would seem to be the perfect subject to use for her thesis, especially since the niece has access to two of Freddy’s notebooks from his later years. Pages from the notebooks are interspersed with the story. Thoughts, ideas for stories, short blurbs - these make up the notebook pages. Langley’s stories remind me of Seinfeld. “What made Langley famous were the compulsion dramas, in which he took an ephemeral thought or urge and followed through to a logical yet extreme conclusion.”

One odd feature were the footnotes. While they imparted information that moved the story forwarded, they also took me out of the story. And the story is odd enough as it is. The Author has definite ideas on academia and they aren’t kind ones. At one point, the grad students lament how they’ve lost the joy of reading. How everything is about “extracting arguments from texts”. One chapter is entitled If a Scholar’s a Parasite”.

This book was described as “wickedly funny” in the blurb, but I didn’t find it funny in the slightest, let alone wickedly so. And the ending was just strange. It didn’t really hang together. I’m glad I read the book but I can’t give it a wholehearted endorsement.

My thanks to netgalley and Little Brown for an advance copy of this book.

'But the alternative is to let your talent lie fallow and rot.'

Anna Brisker is a graduate student at Collegiate University trapped under the heavy weight of her incomplete dissertation that is “very nearly finished”, lacking enthusiasm, feeling uninspired writing about the ” intellectual history of inspiration”. Inspiration, in her mind, isn’t simply floating around like blessed golden confetti thrown by some benevolent being, landing on the chosen. Great works of art and literature take blood, sweat, tears, and talent, of course. She would know, as her own drive has fled. A far cry from the brilliant future everything in her youth promised, a young girl who was valedictorian at her high school and burned as bright at an elite college. How did she get here, feckless and without either the self-control or the divine touch necessary to continue blazing along on her trail of accomplishments. Most says she’d rather stuff a pop tart in her mouth. Her advisor is exasperated by her lack of progress thinking she has lost her focus, her parents think she is lazy, spending her days wandering aimlessly doing nothing to establish herself , they may be right.

Then she meets Helen Langley, niece of Frederick Langley, who for Anna was the introduction to literary culture during her middle school years. A wildly talented writer who burned bright on the scene with his own following, wowing people, producing a book every so many years only to suddenly cease publishing. Perplexed that a man who was said to have ‘found writing easy’ could just one day decide to cease all creativity and live his life closed off, makes what Helen has to say something to put her faith in. Anna she is giddy again with the possibility that something big could come out of this. As she becomes closer to Helen, she discovers that the talented author did not stop writing. In fact, there are notebooks he penned at Collegiate’s Elston Library, hidden. This is exactly the spark of hope Anna needs to feed her passion once again. Helen is the way Anna can get to know Freddy, she is her stroke of luck! Who knew that a chance encounter, a small debt at the grocery store could turn her life around?

Though an antiquarian, Helen isn’t as ‘intellectual’ as Anna but she knows full well the worth of her uncles notebooks. With a promise to her uncle long ago she had sworn to be the keeper of his work but there was a tangle, the school has them, but Helen approves who gets to see them. So begins the plan. Helen is far more bohemian than Anna who lives with means beyond your average struggling student. Everything about Helen is vibrant and full, overly generous maybe messy and a little too free spirited but at least there is no shame in her ‘degeneracy’. Anna intends to help her new friend. So maybe Helen is a little wayward and her talent is in forgery, she does what she must for her survival so what, she grabs life by the throat and certainly doesn’t judge Anna for caving to her own pleasures. More than ones intellectual weight, social status, nor the heft of promise in one’s future this is a story about how we chase the “then what” of life. I sort of felt like saying, what the hell does it matter in the end? Any of it. One woman has family money but can’t seem to get her hands on the life she has envisioned for herself, another wants her own inheritance and comfort and both think Freddy is the means to their end. The two meet in the middle and if things take a bit of a criminal turn, so be it. What will it mean for Anna, and will her dissertation ever get finished?

Clever. Juliet Lapidos points out the snobbery of academia and the mistakes people make by putting all their faith in philosophy too. Talent as accidental, or indiscriminate blessing/curse vs talent as choice, work. Maybe it is just all BS, according to Anna anyway.

Publication date: January 22, 2019

Little, Brown and Company

I received an ARC of this book from the publisher and netgalley for my honest review.

I started off really liking this book. I liked the quirky main character. Her story was an enjoyable read. Towards the second half of the book the author lost me a bit. I started finding it difficult to root for the main character anymore and the ending left me wanting a little more of the story.

Solid read. Makes you think:
* What is talent?
* Who defines what is worthy?
* Does success color the act of writing for the writer? Does it take away the joy?
* What exactly do critics do? Why do they do it?
* What is success? Who defines that?
* Is critical success more or less valuable than monetary success?

I will admit that I had to re-read the ending a couple of times and I'm not even sure that got me to where the author wanted me.

Recommended for people who like a medium-paced narrative that encourages you to think about bigger themes.

I glanced at the other reviews and unfortunately (or fortunately, since the goal of criticism is to examine alternate viewpoints) I can't be quite as enthusiastic about this book. The author definitely knows what she's talking about, and she clearly has an affinity for the subject of writing and literature, but the book completely falls apart in terms of characters and story. There is an attempt at both, and the plot is better than most, but too often the meandering inner monologue of the main character reads too much like the author just wrote down what was passing through her mind that day. The characters lacked distinct voices to the point where it was difficult to tell when it was Story and when it was excerpts from Freddy's notebooks. The end result was a well-intentioned but meandering slog of a read which never ascended beyond a good idea.

Well, as the saying goes it takes talent to recognize talent. By that logic does it make me a talented reviewer to recognize what a clever book Talent is? I love books, books about books, authors, etc. but primarily I read for pleasure. The protagonist of this book, and the main secondary character also for that matter, are two individuals who are also around books all day, but they utilize them in different ways. One, the 29 year old graduate student stuck on finishing her dissertation, dissects literature in search of meaning (or at least something worth of an essay) and the other makes a living binding and/or forging books. Both are connected through an author, who, popular once decades ago, published three books to some success and then walked away from it all. Anna sees him as just the subject to complete her thesis on the nature of inspiration, his niece is after his notebooks worth a decent amount of money. And so it’s a story (or even a satire) of academia primarily and the plot revolves around this preppy proper tweed world of pretense and ambition, but it really sparkles when it comes to tangential discourses. Talent, for me, is an ode to Nothing. Not nothing as in the opposite of something per se, but nothing as an alternative to the ambition driven life. Freddy Langley, the author, walked away from it all to a quiet life of thinking and drinking. Anna Brisker in a way dreams of it (her precise ideal life is that of professor emeritus, which is apparently more or less a comfortable sinecure) as she and the book contemplates just how foreign that idea is to an American mindset. Something about an idle life just goes offensively contrary to Puritanical mentality. Our culture is all about doing, careers, drives, possessions, joining the race, climbing the ladder and so on. No place for dreamers, contemplators or just anyone who isn’t particularly good at life. No one pauses to enjoy the small things. Nothing as a state of stillness and quietude goes dramatically unappreciated. Mind you, Freddy Langley did nothing on his and then his friends and then his brother’s dime and Anna can afford to do nothing on her dead grandfather’s inheritance, but still…as a concept it’s nice to read about. The other thing this book contemplates well is, as you’d imagine with Anna’s thesis, the nature of inspiration and talent. Very interesting, much food for thought on both accounts. And all that aside, it’s just a very entertaining book, advertised as wickedly funny, it was for me more on the darkly humorous side stemming from the genuine cleverness of the narrative. Lapidos with degrees in English and comparative literature really knows her material, the observations on the nature of literary criticism, the way it anatomizes and studies its subjects, the works of substance and originality, to produce something that is neither and a mere theory or speculation at best, rendering the primary source as just a user database, thus depriving books of their very soul…it’s poignant and smart and so well observed. You might not care for the books’ characters, Anna alone is the very embodiment of white privilege, subsisting on poptarts and desperation, but her obsession with Langley and his work still spirals into a very compelling journey. And Langley can be perceived as a man who never got past resentment of his father. And the ending may be considered as lacking finality. But essentially, there’s just too much to enjoy about this book and the terrific writing to compensate for whatever personal likes of dislikes you might have of its denizens. Most auspicious for a debut. Very enjoyable genuinely smart read. And, unlike this rambling review, appealingly succinct. Recommended. Thanks Netgalley.