Wow. What a timely book for our day and age. As someone who works in tech and data I resonated with this book at an existential level.

The Candy House has me questioning a lot of how I have handled my own profiles online, and how as a society so intertwined with technology, we willingly give up so much more than we realize, just for the next craze.

Additionally, I loved the style of this book. Each character, woven together across time and distance. Their lives inextricably linked, yet somehow each standing out in their own right. There are some you will love, some you will loathe, but in the end, aren't we all simply humans?

I did read this book without reading the Goon Squad, so I seem to have some MORE reading to do because reviews say you will get more out of The Candy House by reading that first. I still thoroughly enjoyed this novel and how pensive it made me.

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Nothing hit me harder than this quote

"...Who could resist gaining access to the Collective Consciousness for the small price of making our own anonymously searchable? We all went for it on our twenty-first birthday, Mandala's age of consent, just as prior tech generations went for music sharing and DNA analysis never fully reckoning, in our excitement over our revelatory new access, with what we surrendered by sharing the entirety of our perceptions to the internet"

Many questions to reflect on have surfaced for me:

- What am I willing to give up in exchange to participate in society?
- What happens if I am not willing? Am I comfortable being outcast?
- What are the moral obligations I believe I should uphold as a tech worker?
- When do we go too far?

The emotional turmoil in this book highlights our humanness in a way I deeply connected with. Whether thick ropes of connection, or thin, spidery lines, the web Egan has woven of character connection is truly stunning.

🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟+

Myths and Fairy Tales. Consciousness. Escape. Redemption. Pathos. Eccentricity. Assimilation.

A wildly beautiful book, this literary masterpiece - reminiscent in spirit and some thematic elements of the also-magnificent Kazuo Ishiguro- is both heartbreakingly tender and intensely thoughtful.

While the reader can’t stop thinking about the momentousness of the themes raised, it’s impossible to turn away from emotions soaring or sagging from the weight and wonder of these spellbinding characters, - their trials, traumas, and peculiarities, captured by the author with seemingly effortless freshness and vivacity.

With intricate and incredibly graceful technique, the author recursively layers time and space, in the form of a dense collection of tightly-packed fictional vignettes, - let’s call them narrative bubbles, - each of them imbued with meaning and context, particular and finite, a capsule perfectly capturing non-linear slices of time and space as it concerns one unique characters life; bumping along, touching a myriad of other narrative bubbles; coalescing, dissolving and re-emerging; bursting or binding into larger and more complex compound bubbles, - and so it goes, ad infinitum (easily imagined, boundless to continue, unchecked and multiplying, outside the confines of this narrative).

Amidst a backdrop of the ominous, spectacular power of technology (perhaps inadvertently unleashed, at an always under-appreciated cost) to homogenize, de-humanize, subjugate - these stories, bursting with extraordinariness, cry out for our attention, our hearts, and the oh so human yearning to connect, transcend and personify lives only briefly held as uniquely ours (or so we imagine) to watch.

I adored this book. Easily one of the slim-set of my now favorite all-time books.

So dense with beauty and bigness it begs to be read again. Perhaps slower this time, if possible, with even more appreciation for both story, and storyteller, and ideas unleashed; a legacy left to the mind of each and every reader; touched, dazzled and different, simply by its sharing.

A great big thank you to NetGalley, the author and the publisher for an ARC of this book. All thoughts presented are my own.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for an opportunity to read The Candy House

Unfortunately this books was just not for me. I just couldn’t connect with the characters or the story .

The Candy House starts in the year 2010, when Bix Bouton stumbles upon a revolutionary idea; what if you could upload your unconsciousness to a computer, along with all your memories, thoughts, feelings, and experiences? " Egan takes this idea and runs with it, exploring the multitude of ways this technology and the company that controls it impact society in the years to come. The story leap frogs from character to character, exploring a loose network of individuals and their experiences engaging with or running from this technological innovation. This large cast is both a strength and a weakness for the narrative; Egan is incredibly adept at giving each individual their own voice and employs a variety of interesting writing techniques to do so, although I found it difficult to keep track of all the characters and how they related to one another. I've heard this book includes characters from previous books that I have not read, so those more experienced with her work may not have this issue. However, as a newcomer I felt a few chapters were more focused on following up with these characters and less on the central themes of the novel. Exploring these themes and relating them to our own society and the impact our own technological revolution has had on us is where the novel truly excels, and the author uses this to take us on some unique and wild rides.

I too struggled a little with the huge cast of characters and wished I had time to reread A Visit From the Goon Squad before I tackled this. Having said that, I really enjoyed the book, I found the characters so compelling that I couldn't wait to keep reading. I absolutely recommend this.

I did not realize this book was the prequel to another book. I’m not sure if this book would have been better if I had read the first, but I did keep getting lost while reading this one.

The Candy House by Jennifer Egan is a really smart and enjoyable read about the future of the internet and social media. This is one that I’ll want to read again to catch what I missed because there is a large cast of characters and a family dynamic to keep up with, but the writing and storytelling keeps if flowing. As we live in an age where people willingly give away their personal data, Egan shows what the outcome of that can possibly look like in the very near future. With topics like self-surveillance, algorithms, memory Apps, hacking and so forth, we’ll want to come back to this book just to see what came true.

Jennifer Egan’s follow-up (prequel) to A Visit From the Goon Squad is a challenging read that. while clever and brimming with humor and memorable characters, ends up collapsing under the weight of its varied viewpoints.  Fans of the first book will be better served here than first-time readers to the Egan-verse.  Still, the book boasts some wonderful characters and terrific stories, one of my favorites involving a stubbornly contested property dispute.

When I requested this ARC, I didn’t realize it was a sequel, so I read Goon Squad and started this one immediately afterwards. I read two of these books over the course of one day, so it felt like I read one big book instead of two. I didn’t enjoy this one as much as the first. I liked Sasha and Bennie’s narratives in the first story, and they weren’t as prominent a feature in the sequel. I don’t believe you need to read the first book to understand the second, but it would be beneficial to make you appreciate who these characters are and who they’re related to. The book was written much the same as the first; this one replaces the PowerPoint section of the first with a series of DMs and emails. Not sure that really worked for me either. I also thought the thing with Lulu towards the end was strange.

I tried to pay more attention to the characters rather than the plot around the Collective. Futurist tech stories freak me out.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.