nteresting but not really my cup of tea. Well written I just personally couldn’t get into the story. Which was so disappointing because everyone was talking about how this was the must read book of the year. I honestly couldn’t follow the story lines and wasn’t really sure what was going on most of the time. I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.

I read and enjoyed Goon Squad, and I appreciate how Egan is always doing something completely different. This is the kind of book that's right up my alley. I can definitely see how it would not be for everyone- but if you're a fan of a challenge, I'd definitely say pick this book up.

Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for the review copy!

I wish I would have realized that The Candy House is a sequel of sorts to Jennifer Egan's previous book, A Visit From the Goon Squad, as I hadn't read that book previously, and I believe it would have helped deepen my understanding of the characters and storylines that populate both books. However, even though I didn't read the previous book, this book is enjoyable as a stand alone. The novel explores the enticing future possibility of externalizing your memories--who would you want to share them with? the public in exchange for seeing others memories? or would you try to block any of your existence from this shared memory collective? The complex storyline covers the threads that wove into the creation of this futuristic company and follows the consequences for those who use it and avoid it thereafter, weaving the stories of individuals and how they are all connected to the whole picture, much like all of our personal, social and internet connections today. The book changes perspectives amongst characters, friends, and family members, so the story is often looked at different lenses and angles with a variety of narrative techniques (email, spy hand book, childhood memories). As enjoyable as these characters were, I wish that some of them would have been more in-depth (Bix Bouton--what changed his mind at the end of his life? Why exactly did Chris run Mondrian? What happened to Alfred or Lincoln?). The ending, I believe should have ended with Eureka Gold chapter, switching sections with Middle Son. That would have wrapped things up a bit more completely I think, especially if it included some of hints of endings for the other characters. A very complex, enjoyable, interesting read! It is a story that provokes us to think about our lives, connections with others and what legacy we want to leave behind.

A slow burning literary fugue with nods to several classic works (Orwell meets Joyce), a multitude of multi-layered musical references, and characters that resonate throughout in a tangled web of shared experiences. Egan creates a detailed, world that is cyclic and interconnected. At times, it reminds of ‘’My Girl’ at others a smattering of James Bond meets ‘Jacob’s Ladder’. The maddeningly tumultuous storyline feels relatable on some levels and leaves you reeling at others…like you’ve been dropped into someone’s life experience and you are experiencing it through their eyes, but are powerless to change anything. Like a modern-day Ulysses, this title is worth a reread if you want to philosophize on Eagan’s deeper messages.

Mind-Bending

"Never trust a candy house!"

What happens when you no longer own your thoughts and memories? Do you really want to know what someone was thinking during your most coveted memories? These questions are explored in The Candy House, a multi-layered, multi-modal, and complex novel about a network of shared consciousness and the dangers of losing authenticity.

“Not every story needs to be told.”

An anthropologist's work on predictive behavior leads to the development of Own Your Unconscious, a virtual platform where one can upload memories to relive their favorite experiences and to learn what others thought during certain moments in time. These experiences lead tojoy and misery, as well as a quest for authenticity.

This is an intricate and provocative novel that is difficult to describe. The format mirrors A Visit to the Goon Squad, except where the Goon Squad mirrors a concept album, The Candy House follows the format of electronic dance music.

The narrative thread is developed via character intersections from chapter to chapter. Some of these connective threads are thin and hard to identify, whereas others are bold and definitive. There are stories within stories, but other stories exist outside these stories. The narrative is not linear, as time moves in all directions and intersects in the past, present, and future.

Many of the characters are ones who appeared in A Visit From the Goon Squad, but it has been so long since I read that book that I only vaguely remember them. The characters featured in this book are academics, music business giants, spies, mathematicians, extroverts, counters, eluders, addicts, gamers, con artists, and those desperate to change the world or others who long for human connection. Bix, Lulu, Roxy, Molly, and Lincoln are the characters whose voices stayed with me.

I had to read slowly to savor each story and each voice. This book transported me to a higher plane of thinking. One chapter involved equations that went above my head, but I got the gist of what was trying to be conveyed.

This was a tense and intense reading experience. I didn’t love The Candy House as much as A Visit to the Goon Squad, but I appreciated this novel. I can’t stop thinking about it since I have finished, and it has inspired me to think differently about my memories and the information I share.

I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley and the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

The Candy House by Jennifer Egan is definitely not a book for everyone. I really enjoyed the way this was written where we see people's worlds through different consciousnesses and modalities. We start the book by meeting Bix who created a way to upload and view your own consciousness. We are then introduced to another number of people who have been associated with Bix in some way. It's like playing the game "6 degrees" and finding out who is all connected. My favorite chapter is reading the perspective of Miranda Kline, who gave Bix the initial idea of making our consciousnesses more tangible. I probably highlighted more lines in this book than other others. The definition of a cerebral book.

This book is a velvet string binding friends and family into generations of stories. While the narrative might seem scattered to some, I wholeheartedly loved it. One of my favorite thinks about fiction is good character development and this book has it in spades!

My favorite characters -

Miles - he had it all, threw it all away, but is on a journey if self-discovery. “I invite you to recall the narrative power of redemption stories. America loves a sinner, lucky for me.”

Lincoln - mathematical genius somewhere on the spectrum looking to navigate his way in a world of “typicals” that he doesn’t always understand… and find love.

Molly - her middle school Stella drama cracked me up (since I have gone through middle school with 4 daughters.)

I was tracking well with this book and enjoying it immensely until the Lulu the Spy and See Below chapters. I absolutely hated the format of those chapters and they completely took me out of the story. This was a 5-star book until that point.

That said, it was overall a great read. I enjoyed visiting with all of the characters and delving into their pasts and futures. (Tip - Google a character map of Welcome to the Goon Squad. It will really help you keep track of things.)

Thank you to NetGalley and Scribner for providing me with an advance copy in exchange for an honest review.

The Candy House is the sequel to Jennifer Egan’s Pulitzer Prize winning A Visit From the Goon Squad, and like that novel, Candy House is a non-linear, POV hopping roller coaster of poignant moments and thought-provoking vignettes. While Goon Squad focused on how life is filtered through time, Candy House is much more interested in memories and the things we are willing to sacrifice for technology that feeds our own self-obsessions.

This theme is borne out through new technology that allows people to externalize their memories to be watched - by themselves and others - like a movie. It's a very Black Mirror premise (literally) made even more interesting by Egan’s uncanny ability to write in multiple voices in a cohesive yet singular way.

I didn’t love Candy House as much as Goon Squad, thought that might be because I read them too close together. Had it been a few years since I had heard from these characters, it might have been enough to make this a full five-star read. As it is, I found the overlapping of characters a little too heavy-handed in parts and was confused more than once about who was who and how they were related to everyone else. I know that’s not really what the story is about - but it's just how my mind works.

Great sequel. Almost as good as the original. Jennifer Egan has become one of my favorite contemporary authors.

Before picking up The Candy House, I reread A Visit From the Goon Squad and I am so glad I did. While not a requirement for being able to understand The Candy House, it absolutely made the stories and significantly added to my enjoyment of the novel.

The novel follows many different vaguely interconnected characters, many of whom we were introduced to in Goon Squad, through pivotal moments in their lives. The stories take place at many different points in time and in many locations. It's not the easiest thread to follow, but I can say that I would always feel a hit of serotonin whenever it was revealed who a personal was and how they fit in with other characters. Oh, that's HER daughter! Oh yeah, that guy's brother! Etc.

In addition to being character driven, the novel also explores themes such as authenticity, collectivity, memory, and the future of technology. It explores interesting ideas which I am eager to discuss with others who have read this book.

Thank you to NetGalley and Scribner for providing me with an advance copy in exchange for an honest review. The book is a triumph, I am so pleased to have gotten to read it.

This is an interesting and though-provoking novel about memory, technology, privacy, and family. A companion novel to A Visit from the Goon Squad, it centers around Bix, the owner of a large tech company, who stumbles across a new idea that revolutionizes both his company and, in many respect, the world -- the technology allows people to access all of their memories, download them to an external device, share them with other users of the service, and gain access to the memories of those other users in exchange. The book explores the creators and users of technology, all connected in obvious and subtle ways, over several decades and the ways the technology impacts their lives and relationships. This book is both a great series of character stories and a compelling and original examination of several critical issues.

Very highly recommended!

The Candy House by Jennifer Egan is a very highly recommended imaginative novel of our world, but different. The story is told through an interlocking narrative structure by multiple and inter-generational characters. This novel is brilliant!

Remember: Nothing is free! Only children expect otherwise, even as myths and fairy tales warn us: Rumpelstiltskin, King Midas, Hansel and Gretel. 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.

Bix Bouton is a wildly successful tech giant of Mandala. What he is searching for now is eluding him; he is seeking a new idea or advancement. When he encounters a conversation group meeting after a talk at Columbia, he joins while disguised and finds the direction his next advancement will take. "Own Your Unconscious" allows people to download their memories giving them access to every memory they have ever had. They are stored in a Mandala Cube. This evolves into the ability to upload your memories to "the Collective Consciousness" which then gives you access to the thoughts and memories of everyone in the world who has also shared with the collective.

Millions are seduced, but not everyone. There is a problem that emerges about what to do with so much information. Additionally, not everything or every story needs to be told. There is a counter group of "eluders" who understand the temptation of the candy house and resist it while "counters" are those who track and exploit the measurable tendencies of people.

This is an ingenious, brilliantly written novel, technically accomplished and stylistically masterful. The three parts of the novel are titled: Build, Break, Drop. The chapters are all like interconnected short stories that build the narrative and plot through the voices of a variety of characters and narrative styles. Chapters range from omniscient to first person plural to a duet of voices, an epistolary chapter, an exchange of emails and a chapter of tweets. Characters from A Visit From the Goon Squad (2010) reappear here, but The Candy House is a stand-alone novel.

The characters and their children are all developed as complex individuals as the novel covers a large span of time. The voices and points-of-view of the characters are all unique. The advancement of the plot is told through the voices of all these characters in the unique chapters. It is impressive how the narrative threads in each chapter begin to coalesce to create a complex plot and compelling accomplished novel. I am in awe. One of the best books of the year!

Disclosure: My review copy was courtesy of Simon & Schuster via NetGalley.
The review will be published on Barnes & Noble, Edelweiss, Google Books, and Amazon.

When I originally was approved to read this book on NetGalley I discovered it is somewhat related to one of Egan's previous books, A Visit From The Goon Squad. I made time to read that one first and I'm glad I did because while this book can stand alone, many of the same characters are present and there are references to their past that I only fully understood due to reading the Goon Squad first.

So what's it about? At the center is Bix Bouton, a tech mogul who's technology "Own Your Unconscious" allows you to access all of your memories and to upload the contents to a sharing platform where you can access other people's memories in turn. This obviously changes society- for better or worse, who can say?

Much like A Visit From The Goon Squad, this is a multiple POV story. I read a review that stated making a character map would help to understand the relationship of all the characters to one another and I agree (I actually attempted this).

Egan is an excellent writer and the way the characters' stories are expertly connected really showcases this.

One striking thing about this book is that despite having access to someone's entire swath of memories, you realize there are still some things about them not revealed by the memories themselves. There are still some things you must deduce for yourself.

In the book, one of the characters Alfred makes a hobby of trying to provoke people into authenticity. He visits an old friend who is obviously BSing and Alfred's girlfriend Kristen asks him why he doesn't confront this friend about it. Alfred says "why would I do that? The truth is right there." And Kristen says "Isn't it always?"

For some reason this stuck with me- we can be very preoccupied with authenticity but authenticity is always there as there are always underlying reasons for actions. Which leads me to think about what the true meaning of authenticity is in the age of social media. There is too much to unpack about this book in an short post, but I highly recommend it.

As with A Visit from the Goon Squad, I'll be turning this over and over for a while to come. What a captivating read--thoughtfully constructed, and the characters well-imagined. Each chapter has a style unique to its focal characters, and a few chapters incorporate more experimental efforts to great effect. And while the switch between characters, styles, tone, time periods, and perspectives should be disorienting, Egan once again makes it work as a cohesive whole.

Like Goon Squad, The Candy House comprises a series of interconnected interludes that spans decades--from the 1960s to the 2030s--and characters, many of whom will be familiar to those who read the first book in this series. And like Goon Squad, this book operates around a theme--in this case, authenticity, privacy, individuality, and community in an digital/technological world--while also looping off and around seemingly insignificant moments. Be ready, though: what seem like little touches here and there to add depth to the narrative pop up in interesting ways in other sections. It's an efficient and well-plotted novel.

What makes this book so gorgeous is the way that structures illuminate the theme. There's a real delight to reading each story, as you see old friends and new acquaintances pop up in unexpected ways. If you were to map the interactions and relationships of The Candy House on a piece of paper, it would look like a connective web not unlike those you would imagine in the Collective Consciousness--the centralized social space that arises from a memory-extracting technology that one characters develops...based on algorithms that another character created...which another character sells...and which inspires another character to develop an industry to thwart the collective memory sharing...

Characters discover that unfettered access to information and other people's unfiltered memories often cause as much harm as benefit. They (re)learn that time is a goon, and that revisiting long-lost moments does not give us the power to change or better understand them. They recognize that meaning comes not from limitless information but from the narratives that we can ascribe to information--whether in archetypes and recurring tropes, or in the infinite possibilities that fiction creates.

A note on whether or not you need to have read Goon Squad to enjoy this: I did and loved it, but that was over a decade ago. I didn't reread before jumping into The Candy House and can affirm you'll probably do fine without (re)reading it--but don't be afraid to use the book's Wikipedia page as a quick refresher when you're trying to remember the characters' back-stories.

Don't feel guilty about overindulging in this candy store. There's no calories in The Candy House, just spectacular writing and a plot that's both fascinating and harrowing. Jennifer Egan calls The Candy House a "sister" story to her Pulitzer prize winning novel A Visit from the Goon Squad, and it features Bix Bouton, who had a secondary role in "goon squad." Bix is now 40 and bored with life. To cope Bix creates technology that allows people to access every memory they've ever had, as well as the memories of others. It's a concept that's timely and very thought provoking. You need patience and persistence to appreciate (forget understanding!) The Candy House as there's a carousel of characters and writing styles. But you'll be rewarded for persevering, as The Candy House is unparalleled in size, scope, and brilliance. Jennifer Egan should make room on her shelf for another Pulitzer. The Candy House deserves that and more.

This book is magnificently weird. In an imagined world that is not as far-fetched as it might be (close-fetched?), a series of interlinked stories examine the meaning and power of consciousness. A new technology allows users to download, store, replay and share their memories. The term “Brain Dump” takes on alarming immediacy. The great COVID-19 false news of sensors injected along with vaccines is true in this world, and technologists are employed in vast numbers to mine the data produced. The world building takes place around several interconnected families whose stories are told in turns and in pieces.

I loved it, and finished it wanting to reread Goon Squad. My only issue was keeping track of the characters as the story jumped from one to another, with accompanying changes in the point of view.

I voluntarily read and reviewed an advanced copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

last night i read a negative review of this book in the Atlantic, and even tho i thought the review had no merit it was good to be reminded of enough of the plot to write my own review. the Atlantic review discusses Candy House in terms of its relation to A Visit from the Goon Squad and since i don't remember a damn thing about Goon Squad this was difficult for me to appreciate, plus like i said, i think the reviewer gets it all wrong. Candy House is about the internet, some five years from now, as a place where privacy is so dead we can upload all of our consciousness to the cloud, thus of course putting in the cloud all the people who ever interacted with us in any way at all. this is the premise. but then jennifer egan does what jennifer egan does, which is tell what amounts to a series of interconnected short stories about the various characters, and in doing this she goes back and forth in time, showing the characters connect, grow, succeed, fail, etc. i do not think that the point of all this is to talk about a dystopian privacy-less future. i think the point is to discuss how the various often monumental changes that occur in technology and culture do little to affect what i will call the human condition i.e. the fact that we are people with complex inner lives and complex stories and rich, deeply textured presences in the world. so for me this book was mostly the story of these people, whom i grew quite fond of, whom i rooted for, whom i felt for.

now the other thing about jennifer egan is that she is an absolutely phenomenal writer. like most of us i read all the time, obviously not only literature but also what my friends write and what my students write and what various people write in articles and on twitter and in magazines, and there is good writing and not so good writing, but jennifer egan is just a cut above. she could tell me the story of just about anybody and i would read it and delight in it immensely. there is a section about a spy that is so intensely brilliant, i had to slow down to do the readerly equivalent of sipping very old whiskey.

so yeah, loved this book, absolutely fucking loved it.

At first I was wary, but I ended up really enjoying this read. It didn’t feel messy or disorganized as some others have stated. To me it felt natural and the stories flowed seamlessly, to be honest that bit almost felt otherworldly. I have to say that Bix’s invention reminded me a lot of an episode of (new) Doctor Who that features a collective mind/unconscious so I wonder if the author was at all influenced by that. Some themes were heartbreaking in this novel, there is not much uplifting. Do not go into this expecting a feel good read.

DNF: did not enjoy the writing style. I realized that I enjoyed A Visit from the Goon Squad a long time ago when I was a different person, and these books are just no longer up my alley.

A Visit from the Goon Squad is one of my all time favorite books, so I was elated to receive an advance copy of its companion novel/sequel The Candy House.

Like Goon Squad, the novel is composed of several interrelated stories, with the same characters popping up or at least referenced over and over again. Writing a novel with such a complex web of character relationships might come across as forced, but I really like it. Is it necessary for some minor character to be the second cousin of the ex-roommate of the wife of the previous story’s protagonist? No. But is it fun? Absolutely.

The theme of this book, as much as there is one, is big tech. The specific innovation at the center of this story involves the digitization of one’s memories. That’s not particularly inventive, but Egan also created a faction dedicated to fighting against this tech, which I thought was a fresh approach. In my lifetime, backlash to big tech has started to snowball, but much of it still relies on social media campaigns and individual action, such as #deleteFacebook. As Silicon Valley’s influence over society continues to grow, I think that we may see more organized forms of resistance and backlash and Egan will have been proven prescient.

The book’s title is an apt metaphor for the tech world and one that I hadn’t considered before. It’s a reference to the Hansel and Gretel fairy tale as well as a poetic, if much more sinister, spin on the rather trite saying around that “if a product is free, you are the product.” You come to the candy house to eat, but end up being eaten.

Ultimately, though, the book is all about people, and big tech is just a tool to learn more about them. I love that we get to see these characters at all different points of their lives. I think that Egan’s particular genius is in understanding the vast range potential that each person holds, and making full use of that in her writing. A lesser author would take a talented and popular kid and have him grow into a talented and popular adult. Egan can take that same kid and show him first excelling on the Little League field, then in middle age as a high-strung lawyer with all the markings of success but whose life is teetering on the brink, then as a divorced and impoverished recovering addict. And at each stage, she’s able to make the reader feel for the character.

I very much enjoyed this book, and I would quickly recommend it to anyone, but especially those who liked A Visit from the Goon Squad.