I am being generous with my star rating because I acknowledge that I was not the audience for this book. I didn't read A Visit from the Goon Squad and never had a desire to read it. I didn't realize that the books were connected until I was already 100 pages in. The book started out fairly strong but there were too many characters, too many time period shifts, and too much science fiction for my taste.

I definitely believe it would have helped had I read “A Visit from the Goon Squad” prior to reading this book. Personally I had a hard time following the story.

There is no doubt that Jennifer Egan is a talented writer, unfortunately this book just wasn’t for me.

For those into speculative fiction, this is a definite must read but I would suggest you read the first book “A Visit from the Goon Squad” first.

Thank you to #netgalley and #scribner for allowing me to read the eARC. All opinions expressed above are my own.

Egan has a particular flavor to her books, and it isn't candy. It's supposedly "literary sci-fi," which generally means "people have feelings, most of them moody then uplifted." I will never understand what it is that's supposed to set Egan apart from other genre writers, that makes her so much more worthy of praise. Her characters here are tiny pools of emotion we dip our fingers into to experience brief moments with, but don't ask me by the end how everyone is connected, because I've long lost track. Did I enjoy the book? Yes, same as with Goon Squad. But I see the fawning to come and I don't get it. Maybe there's more here than a writer who manages to capture multiple distinctive voices (and a few that blend together in their sad reflectiveness). If so, I suppose I'm not cool enough to see it, again.

It’s remarkable that Jennifer Egan is able to engage with the questions she does in the way that she does. Her latest is a followup (companion novel; Egan doesn’t consider it a sequel) to her 2011 Pulitzer-winner, A Visit from the Goon Squad, visiting familiar characters as well as new ones, though knowledge of the previous installment isn’t necessary to enjoy this one.

The Candy House one of those books that seems to go as deep as you want it to; regardless of your interest in philosophizing about the future of humanity, there are wonderful stories here, enjoyable purely for the warmth and life in Egan’s characters and the ease with which she breathes it into them.

It’s delightfully readable and often heartwarming. The novel dips its toes into tragedy as well, and this is yet another one of its strengths: the grace with which Egan handles wildly disparate regions of character.
Though nothing is as startling and intriguing as the PowerPoint chapter in A Visit From the Goon Squad, there’s plenty to be had here in terms of perspective. Central characters range from a successful lawyer who falls into drug addiction to an awkward thirteen-year-old girl at a country club, from a spy implanted with extensive military technology to a dispirited writer mourning his father. From earliest to latest the timespan the novel covers, in total, nears a century.

The crown jewel for me is the epistolary chapter, a jumble of back-and-forth emails between a handful of characters that will be a favorite for those who loved Goon Squad, sort of a grand comedic reunion that shows how easy it is to love Egan’s characters while also displaying her tight construction in the form of these characters’ interwoven lives.

On the surface, The Candy House is a work of speculative fiction gazing into a near future, focused primarily on the consequences of the hyper-vulnerable oversharing that increasingly characterizes the way many of us engage with the internet. The technology that exists in Egan’s future, “Own Your Unconscious,” is this attitude taken to its logical extreme. While initially marketed as a means of understanding oneself, “Own Your Unconscious” quickly inflates to serve another purpose: satisfying humanity’s insatiable curiosity about the lives of others. In exchange for uploading the totality of their conscious memories to the network, one is given free rein over every other user’s memories.

There are horror stories. One character, browsing her father’s memories, experiences first hand his strong preference for her brother over her; one of her sisters does the same thing and witnesses her father’s lust for his teenage girlfriend: “The intimate flux of his thoughts sickened her […] Roxy sat numb and horrified, thinking she might vomit, or die.”

More interesting than the direct implications of the technology are the more indirect ones, primarily the discussion of authenticity. The vast influx of information coincides with a tendency to view humanity from the disengaged lens of stock roles, broadly categorizing people as Harried Moms, Former Junkies, Enabling Sidekicks, and so on. It is as though, given such a wealth of data about human behavior, our poor pattern-seeking brains have to start reducing in order to cope.

This, in turn, offers a new problem: how do we come to terms with a way of living that seems to tell us our most intimate experiences are common, uninteresting?

One character resents the Caulfield-esque “phoniness” of the world — why won’t anyone just act like themselves? — whereas others are all-too-eager to flatten the world at large into characters, but both make the mistake of believing tropes represent life. There’s a sense in which we have to recognize these patterns as accurate while also acknowledging that they are enormous simplifications. In an elegant passage at the end of the book, Egan observes a mother watching her son at home plate, describing her emotions as “cliché to anyone who’s read a book or seen a movie about children playing sports and how their mothers feel, and yet — how is this possible? — fiercely specific […] part of a picture that turns generic the instant you cease to have a stake in it, as in: The boy at bat is your boy.”

These stock roles seem to proliferate around us when we view things from a detached, theoretical perspective, but that isn’t how human life is lived. It’s so easy to reduce anything to the generic, to take any aspect of our lives and represent it as a trope, but why should this rob our lives of value?

In a lovely moment near the novel’s end, she writes of people and falling snow: “From a distance they fade into uniformity, but they were moving, each propelled by a singular force that was inexhaustible.”

The experiences that make human life worth living are irreducible; when we live these experiences, they transcend any rubric that equates uniqueness with value. The Candy House illustrates these singular forces with humility, basking in the beautiful and human things: in friends and family, in love and longing and connection.

Oofff this novel was too heady for me and it was work to read it. There are multiple parts that presumably fit together through the characters being connected through a familial web of relations and/or their ties to Mondorian (the company that developed Own Your Unconscious, a virtual platform where one can upload memories which can then in turn be accessed by society at large through a collective program) And Mondorian also has the ability to erase/clean memories from your conscious.

The premise of this novel is certainly one that intrigued me. What happens when you no longer own your memories? Would I want someone to know what I was personally thinking during some of my memories? After reading this book, I still struggle as to what my answer would be to the latter questions as clearly not all memories are great. I think I would want to keep my memories from the collective program, but having my descendants being able to access certain portions of my memories might be nice.

The story is not told in a linear fashion and sometimes it was hard to discern where in the timeline I was. I likely would have rated this one higher if the story had been told in a more straightforward and consumable manner....it felt like Egan was trying to say something important while intentionally obfuscating it. "Never trust a candy house. It was only a matter of time before someone made them pay for what they thought they were getting for free." There's a cautionary tale in there somewhere about how we have already become the product. People who love A Visit From the Goon Squad and/or speculative fiction may or may not enjoy this one more than I did.

Loved! So fun! I tend to fall heavy for books written by authors who play with form, and Jennifer Egan does it best. In The Candy House, she’s showing off — first person, second person, third person, epistolary — all masterfully written.

The stories in The Candy House, like A Visit from the Goon Squad, are all capable of standing on their own, but combined they spin an intelligible web. The stories in both novels fit snugly together, as most characters overlap, so I often went back to reread chapters from AVFTGS, which are still as great as I remembered.

I’m also obsessed with the way Egan wove Black Box into this novel, ten years later. That story is one of my all-time favorites, and it worked beautifully here.

I just can’t wait to read whatever Egan writes next!

I think literary fictions readers will love this book. There are many characters, and the story changes between them showing how their lives are intertwined. I personally found this to being confusing and it really had to make me think and concentrate.

The technology aspect of being able to relive your past experiences by downloading your memories, to a storage that can be accessed by anyone, was very interesting. It made me think of the Icloud and of futuristic movies like demolition man.

While this was a miss for me personally I think with the right audience and mindset going in it will be a hit and well received with others.

"Tongue-in-cheek nostalgia is merely the portal, the candy house, if you will, through which we hope to lure in a new generation and bewitch them... Never trust a candy house." I feel like I was entertained reading this book, but kind of taxed too as it requires work and concentration. Even still you might not follow who is connected to who by what because there are so many characters and the connections are constant. Practically every chapter is presented in a different style.

Tech guru Bix Bouton created a company called Mandala which allows one to Own Your Unconscious, but then he worried he'd never produce another big idea and just end up a middle aged married dad of four. But then he did find the inspiration he needed to follow up with something divisive called the Collective Consciousness.

Ted and Susan Hollander had three boys: Alfred who is obsessed with authenticity, Miles the anal one, and Ames in the middle. Ted remarried Portia and they hosted a salon where tech guru Bix Bouton came incognito and came up with his next big thing. After son Miles became an addict and lost everything he went to his cousin Sasha's in California where her husband Drew saved him from committing suicide. Sasha was friends with Bix's wife. Sasha's uncle is Ted Hollander.

Lou Kline is a music producer with 6 kids: Charlene, Roxy, Rolph and Krysanne aka Kiki and their half-sisters Lana and Melora. Lana's mother Miranda wrote Patterns of Affinity, which inspired Bix in some way. Lou's son committed suicide after he fell in love with his dad's gf Jocelyn. Melora took over Lou's business. Lou's protege Bennie Salazar has a son named Chris who runs a Dungeons & Dragons group in rehab with his high school friends Colin Bingham and Molly Cooke. Molly's older sister Hannah ends up being Bix's lawyer.

Yet another book that I got via Net Galley and one that hasn’t been released yet! Jennifer Egan does a PHENOMENAL JOB of proving out the ramifications of tech governing our lives. We learn about a company called Mandala. Their product Own Your Unconscious — that externalizing of memory that can then be uploaded to the Collective Unconscious has taken over the world. We learn about the different people who are affected by the product from the anthropologist whose idea led to the product, to the company’s founder. I definitely found this book challenging because I am not very good at retaining a timeline in my head. However the ideas and questions posed by this book (via the characters) are definitely worth thinking about specially if you live your life via tech (which everyone does). I haven’t read any of her other work but I am intrigued by it now!

I never cease to be amazed by how well Jennifer Egan can bring you so deeply into the mind of such vastly different characters. From bored, middle-aged men to spoiled country club preteens, from femme fatale spies to elderly addicts...the talent she has to convey all their voices so vibrantly amazes me at every turn of the page.

Every story holds up so well on it's own that you don't end up tripping over the connections. Once you stop trying to catch every single drop, you can start to appreciate the rain. So much time is covered, as we go forward and back. One of the things I really appreciate is how even in the futuristic chapters, it's still so relatable and dripping with humanity. It never seems that far off from how life is now...or how it's always been.

The ideas of counters and eluders and a whole "Collective Conscious" is so fascinating to me. I loved exploring not only both "sides" of the theoretical debate, but also to watch how this affected trends and relationships and snide, offhand comments between acquaintances. It was so palpably real.

I am seriously dazzled by Jennifer Egan. The Candy House is high on my list of all time favorite books and I can't wait to visit it again and again, finding new collections and gems over and over.

The Candy House is a very confusing book which I struggled to read. But I persevered as I was able to link a story to a character in a previous one. I wish I could have been more engaged in this book but unfortunately it missed the mark for me.

Written in Egan’s poetic conversational prose, this novel takes the reader on a transcendental ride around the world and into the cosmos. We are introduced to characters who are separate, yet cleverly intertwined in ways one cannot imagine.

Throughout the story we learn about these eccentric individuals, their good, bad, happy and completely messed up lives. But don’t fear! There is humor sprinkled into the memories of these individuals whose age range consists of babies to the elderly to the ageless.

Bix Bouton owns a company called Own Your Own Unconsciousness where people are able to download and share their memories to look at themselves or to transfer to others. It is these memories the reader is able to glimpse as the narrative progresses. The story questions the validity of technology as to whether there is harm in too much advancement versus the simpler life of less complicated times.

Egan’s mastery is shown in the way she is able to work the character’s personalities separately, but then show how they are connected through each other. The reader begins to see a plot and story emerge rather than being given what will happen at the beginning.

The Candy House is a satisfying, interesting, heartbreaking yet funny story told magnificently through an imaginative art of technology with superior characters and their tarnished flaws which are certainly relatable.

Thank you #NetGalley #Scribner #JenniferEgan #TheCandyHouse for the advanced copy.

I loved Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad, so when I saw that she was publishing this, I have been waiting for the day I could get my hands on it.

Egan is original and inventive in her narrative structure, and while the switching perspectives were at times jarring, this book kept me on the edge of my seat and engaged with each turn of the page. The book requires an attentive reading--complex characters and time jumps made me want to take notes to be sure I could keep up with Egan's brilliance. I love Egan's speculation of what our future could look like and the cautionary messages on technology she incorporates throughout.

I do think this book can stand alone from AVFTGS, but I think it creates a richer experience for the reader if one reads that work before devouring this The Candy House.

Wow. Just wow. I can’t begin to structure my review with anything like the genius possessed by Jennifer Egan. I adored Visit from the Goon Squad, and while this sequel can stand on its own, I had to go back and refresh my memory as characters from that brilliant book popped up.

A treatise on cyber-life, a family saga, a time travel extravaganza….and so much more. Many characters and stories to keep track of, but ultimately the various parts come together beautifully.

Egan uses so many forms of storytelling that it can be dizzying to switch gears, but it’s as thrilling as the best ride in your favorite theme park.

Brava to Ms Egan for once again delivering a masterwork.

Much gratitude to Scribner Publishing for the wonderful opportunity to read an advance copy of The Candy House in exchange for an honest review. Thanks also to Netgalley!

I tried. I really tried. Egan is inventive, to be sure, but this goes every which way. There's first person narration, second person narration, third person narration, texts, tweets (save us from tweets), letters, and so on. There are a lot (too many) characters. The plot (such as it is) ping pongs around defying you to figure out where it's going. She's got a lot to say about how tech, especially social media and gaming, have changed our lives, not always for the better. As much as I wanted to like this, I just didn't. I appreciate that others find Egan brilliant and her writing soaring, but I found myself shaking my head. Thanks to the publisher for the ARC. Fans of literary fiction know this one will win prizes.

The Candy House starts off with Bix a 40 year old incredibly successfull entrepreneur who is desparate for his next big idea. He stumbles into a conversation with some Columbia professors and from that night spurns his new technology that allows you to access all your memories and share them with others.

From there the book spins each chapter into a different character told in a multitude of narratives. At first I wasn't sure if this book was for me but after a few chapters you get into the flow of the random interconnectiveness. It was about half way through where I finally had my ah ha moment and realized what I think the author was trying to achieve with these different stories. I do wish I had jotted down the characters from the beginning and the relationships as it was a bit confusing to follow and trying to remember how people were connected as the book also jumps around time periods.

This one is a hard one to descripe part sci-fi, part contempory fiction, part technology it was a wonderful mash up. I really need to move up the Goon Squad on my tbr list. ***Thank you Netgalley and Scribner for the ARC in exchange for an honest review***

A series of interconnected stories revolving around a tech company that develops a collective conscious.

I loved every moment of this book. Bix is the most complex and compelling character I have encountered in a long time. Great concept, good pacing. This is one that I will constantly recommend.

First of all, thank you to @scribnerbooks and @netgalley for my advance reader copy of this book. It was my first one and very much appreciated!

A Visit from the Goon Squad had been on my TBR for quite some time and I had never gotten around to reading it, but after I got my copy of this book, I picked up Goon Squad and read it. The Candy House is sorta a sequel to the Goon Squad. You can technically read it without reading Goon Squad first, but I would recommend reading both, as close to each other as you can. Mainly because I thought The Candy House was not so much a sequel as a continuation of A Visit from the Goon Squad. Both are written in a very similar way, almost like short stories, except all the characters are connected. I think without reading Goon Squad, you miss some of those connections.

It's pretty difficult to explain what Candy House is about. I thought that Goon Squad was really about the passage of time and getting from point A to point B in life. I think Candy House was similar in that it shows various snippets in these interconnected lives. It's also about holding onto memories I think. There was a bit of sci-fi introduced into this book, in a near future where people have the option to upload their memories to the Collective Consciousness and also access memories from this consciousness. I thought this was the most interesting piece of this book and something I wish was focused on more.

My favorite chapter was "Case Study: No One Got Hurt" about Alfred Hollander who screams in public. That chapter made me laugh out loud. But I really did not like "See Below" which was a chapter in the form of emails which went on and on... And on. It was not that enjoyable to read. Honestly, it sorta felt like the author was showing off how much of a web of interconnected relationships she could make and it got boring at times.

But go get a copy and give it a try if you get a chance! It's a unique read. Publish date April 5th!

Egan is a master. This book is connected to a previous collection of intertwined stories, the Pulitzer Prize winning "A Visit From The Goon Squad", but I don't think you need to read the earlier work to fully appreciate how excellent this book really is. There are technologies in this world she imagines that are speculative and *just beyond* our society today, but with Egan's deft touch, you get the sense that she's talking about a world only a few years away. At the end, the stories are less about the speculative technology and more about the human interactions that lead to those modern advances. It's about society and technology and music and slices in our time, but ultimately it's the humans that inhabit her world that truly shine here. I will need to re-read this more than once to appreciate the nuances, but this was amazing.