What an amazing treat to read - at the 20% mark, I was convinced I hated this book and its characters; I’m not sure at what point I switched to being completely enthralled but that’s how I ended it. Similar to Goon Squad, Egan takes the reader through a web of interconnected characters and their stories, mostly moving forward in time with a few steps backwards every so often. Through this structure, she slowly builds a (terrifying) vision of a future where everyone’s consciousnesses are connected in a grotesque form of advanced social media, with a counter movement of people “eluding” their online presences. While this is on its own is an interesting thought exercise of where the future of social media and tech innovations could lead, I found even more fascinating the view of future that we picked up only through glimpses (lulu the spy, the general in X country), hinting of American “patriotism”, militarism, and exceptionalism gone a step too far (yet not far fetched when you look at the current state of things).

Note that if you like to keep track of character relationship, you may want to start drawing diagrams/taking notes beginning from chapter 1!

Bix is a social media tycoon who has developed a way for people to upload their memories online into what becomes known as the "collective consciousness." After introducing us to Bix, Egan tells the stories of an array of interconnected characters who have been affected by Bix's invention, The poignant ending, where re return to Bix and how his death has affected his son, shows that humanity is best known, not through our memories, but through the stories we tell. In fact, the book reads like a series of short stories, and readers are treated to some memorable characters, especially Alfred, who shows his "authenticity" by screaming in public, and Lulu, a secret agent who narrates her mission in the form of field notes. This is billed as a follow-up to A Visit From the Goon Squad, which I haven't read but definitely want to!

Following a cast of characters interwoven throughout each other’s lives, this book serves as a cautionary tale about the dangers and invasiveness of technology and where we’re heading as a society.
With a unique take on the traditional narrative style, Egan not only manages to capture the raw beauty entangled in the complexities of each character’s struggles but finds a way to eloquently describe their downfall as well.
Reminding me of a “Black Mirror” episode, this book had me hooked and was difficult to forget once completed. So, once finished, I went back to the beginning and began reading again. And I am glad I did! There were subtle clues that I had missed the first time around, which made re-reading it that much more of a treat.

ARC was provided by the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

"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. Why could nobody see this?"

Although kinda sorta a sequel to Egan's Pulitzer Prize winning A Visit from the Goon Squad, don't be fooled into thinking you must read that book before picking this one up. In fact, you don't even need to read the first chapter of The Candy House to grasp the second chapter. You see, much like with Goon Squad, Candy House is a collection of short stories that are told via different literary styles in different time periods by different characters. I would argue that Candy House focuses primarily on the character Bix Bouton and his Black Mirror-esque invention called Own Your Unconscious - a technology that allows the user to access all of their memories, provided they upload said memories such that they can be accessed by others as well. Own Your Unconscious has changed the world, for better or for worse, and subsequent chapters dive into how that's the case.

Candy House is in some ways a mirror image of Goon Squad and in other ways it is a completely unrelated work of literary art. Whereas in Goon Squad you had the famous Power Point chapter, in Candy House there's a chapter comprised solely of Tweets. There's an epistolary chapter made up of emails. There's one chapter simultaneously told from the viewpoint of two sisters. As I wrote in my review of Goon Squad, "Egan tried something new - different formats of storytelling to go along with the different characters and different time periods in which the stories are set - and it worked."

Whereas Goon Squad was an interesting foray into blending multiple POVs, stylistic choices, and time-periods, it left me wondering... so what? What was the theme? The overarching message? The point of the story? With Candy House, this all felt more concrete to me - Egan created a book about the multitude of effects that social media has on us today and projects what those snowballing effects may look like in the future.

One gripe is that with a plethora of characters and the loose connections they had to each other, I had a very tough time keeping everybody and everything straight. As such, I may remember the sentiment of this book a year from now, but I won't remember a single character nor their significance to the overarching story. With Goon Squad, I had the help of trusty Wikipedia to remind me of who was related to who, but since Candy House hasn't been released to the masses yet, I was flying blind this time around.

"A Visit From the Goon Squad" is one of my favorite books, ever, so I was super excited to see that Egan had written a companion book. I reminded myself that reading experiences like Goon Squad are few and far between -- and might depend on "right time" just as much as "right book." Expectations prudently tempered, I jumped in. I was not disappointed.

"The Candy House" echoes "Goon Squad" in both form and function. Like the earlier book, it is told in multiple perspectives and discrete chunks, or vignettes, that you might not immediately recognize as connected to the other perspectives or chunks. Inevitably, though, the thread that binds one character, event, time period or experience to the others becomes clear. There is no easy-to-follow, linear plot here, but instead a traveling through time with frequent doubling back. Realizations and understandings come to you in flashes and memories, just like in real life. For me, that is the brilliance of both "Goon Squad" and "Candy House." It's not about plot so much as it is about life. If you don't get what I'm saying, this book will probably not be your cup of tea.

I don't give 5-star ratings, except to my absolute favorites, so I'd settle a really solid 4.5 on "Candy House." It didn't resonate and impress quite as much as "Goon Squad," but that might simply be because Egan had already done it before and so it wasn't 100% original like Squad was. Also, it was a bit more science-fictiony and future-oriented than the first book. This is not a flaw in itself, but a certain warmth / nostalgic feeling I got from some scenes in that book were missing from this one. Compared to most other books, it is amazing.

I didn't reread goon squad before reading, and loved this FEELING I knew all these people without remembering all the exact reasons why-- form. breaking, how did she do it making each section feel like its own world, the play of the technology elements are the perfect conduits for getting so deep so fast with all these characters. I will never know how she does it, but what a mind-blowing journey to be along for the ride.

The Candy House was a difficult book for me. The chapters are each about a different character, and written in different styles- first person, third person, some as emails or laden with heavy statistics. I found this difficult to keep track of the characters and plot.

Additionally, I was disappointed that while marketed as a companion to A Visit From the Goon Squad, I did not find very many links or similarities. While I loved AVFTGS, I did read it almost a decade ago, so it could be my memory failing me.

Overall I appreciate Jennifer Egan’s brilliance and creativity and look forward to more from her in the future. Thank you to NetGalley for providing me with an arc of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Holding Tight to Your Memories

This is formidable book. The structure and its message are daunting and sometimes difficult to unravel.

Our first introduction is to Bix, a forty-year-old black man who has attained stardom in the tech world. He is brilliant and everlasting curious. His busines or let’s say the pinnacle of his brilliance leads him to create “Own Your Own Unconscious.” We all are aware that technology can take us down a destructive path. Egan shows us in unique formats within her chapters. Prose is plausible to me. E-mail correspondence can connect her characters, for better or worse. I liked parts of all the characters, I wanted them to be happy and attain their goals. But they struggle and failures, unfortunately, occur.

I had to read some chapters twice, I became lost until I discovered the connection to other characters. If you want to read about vulnerable people caught in an ultra-techie world, this is the place for you.

My gratitude to Net Galley and Scribner for this pre-published book. All opinions expressed are my own.

The Candy House by Jennifer Egan is one of the most unique books I have read in a long time. Each chapter highlights a different voice, but is also often written in a completely different format. Some of them are prose, some written as emails between characters, and even a collection of tweets. It is a book you need to pay attention to as you read. If you put it down for a little while, you may need to remind yourself of certain characters and their connections to each other as you progress through the novel.
At its heart, this book is about relationships; the relationships we form with ourselves, with others, and how technology can enhance or manipulate those relationships. I took this as a cautionary tale of how far technology can go. How it can woo you into thinking it is all for the greater good, when in reality it is taking a part of your humanity (literally in Own Your Unconscious".
The book is beautifully and expertly written. It is organized in a new and unique way, but it keeps you reading. You care about the characters and you want to know how they are connected. You find yourself rooting for every one of them, as Egan shows you their human and vulnerable side, no matter their past outward actions.
This book definitely takes you for a ride. You need to hold on and ride it out. You will not be disappointed.

Egan has done it again! I fell in love with her previous novel “A visit from the goon squad” and this quasi sequel does not disappoint. Based on the precipice of holding tight to memories and leveraging them almost with monetary value /communal value is brilliant. I could not out this book down and will be thinking about all the questions it awakened for quite some time,

I totally did not get this book. It was very cerebral and out of my comfort zone. I tried to make heads or tails out of it with no success. I kept getting confided with all of the different story lines.
This book was a total miss for me.

This was a difficult novel for me to immerse myself into because every now and then a character would surface that I remotely remembered from the goon squad novel that I read after it was originally published, and then we'd jump into a new set of characters, and I wondered if this was a collection of connected short stories, not a novel, then finally come to my senses and realize it doesn't matter what it is--just read.

Some chapters were so damn good that I was sorry they came to and end, and I'd skim over some of the more techy/flashy chapters hoping they'd be in the next chapter, and to some degree they were, or we'd meet a parent, a cousin, some connection, and onward we'd go in this world where memories are connected (though I wish it had been that music was the connection because memories are so faulty and haunting).

Many readers will soar with this novel, be energized by the uniqueness, the notion of stored memories, the return of D & D, the tech connections, and others will be lost, while others, like myself, will pause, thinking about the chapters that blew you away.

This is one of those books I want to read again. I'm loving recent novels in this style- where each chapter is a short story, but they are all connected and intertwined. The Candy House raises questions about social media, the internet, and how we can truly connect to each other in this age of technology. What does it mean to connect with someone else- and what happens if you decide to not engage with others online. Super relevant.

The Candy House set my brain on fire in a good way. I’m calling it: The Candy House will be in my Top 10 Books of 2022, probably even the Top 3. It’s hard to see what’s going to beat this book. It’s brilliant, fun, challenging, thought-provoking, compassionate, and oddly optimistic.

The Candy House won’t make much sense if you haven’t read A Visit to the Goon Squad. If you have, the structure of interlocking stories and mixed forms of narrative will feel both familiar and exciting. The stories/chapters jump between different generations and time frames from 1965 to 2035, and finding remote connections between people, events, and places in both books is as satisfying as a literary puzzle. Although the focus has mostly shifted toward their kids, Bennie, Sasha, Drew, Dolly, and the others are back, and they’re literally bringing the band back together.

While Goon Squad is about rock nostalgia and the music business, The Candy House centers on memory, techno-paranoia, and trust, giving us a bit of a “Black Mirror” vibe. Most stories feature some connection to a future high-tech invention, “Own Your Unconscious,” which allows users to save, upload, and access their own memories in the cloud. If you’re willing to share your memories, you may also “experience” memories of others and see past events from multiple perspectives. Predictably, OYU proves to have pros and cons, but no matter how the book’s characters feel about memory harvesting, their own memories and stories link their lives in a complicated web of interconnections.

I loved the melancholic nostalgia of A Visit to the Goon Squad, but The Candy House has a more positive tone which feels refreshing. While there might be lessons here about privacy and trust, the novel never feels preachy, moralistic, or self righteous. The focus is not so much on the dangers of sharing details of our lives, but rather on the tenuous bonds we all form and reshape in our lives. We see how coincidences and connections bring hope, compassion and redemption for even the most flawed and broken people. There is a strong longing for togetherness and community running through every part of this book from the first story to the very last scene. I loved the tender hope, resilience, and optimism of this book. Beautifully conceived, flawlessly executed. A must read!

Thank you to Simon & Schuster and NetGalley for an opportunity to read and review an advance copy.

"The Candy House" is a worthy follow-up to "A Visit from the Goon Squad." (It is helpful, but not necessary, to revisit "Goon Squad" to frame all the characters' affiliations, as there is a good deal of overlap with the "Goon Squad" metaverse.) Like "Goon Squad," "Candy House" addresses postmodern connection and disconnection, and delves deeper into issues of use and applications of technology, particularly data mining. What's next after social media? Does technology connect us, or keep us apart? Is it our duty to "share" everything, and what do we lose by removing our filters? Do technology, tracking, the collection and cataloguing of data -- every piece of data -- help us in the end, or disable us? What is authentic? Are our habits, our data, our patterns, all we have to define us? If we can completely capture our memories and experiences for others to view, is that the same as connecting organically? And where does art, and particularly fiction, fit in when we have access to millions of people's lives as they lived them? Provocative and worthy of being discussed at length both on social media and in person.

The Candy House blew me away with this plot of a future where people’s memories are saved to a cloud and can be shared or reexamined by others. Jennifer Egan’s concept is an evolution of the internet, social media and artificial intelligence. Her plot raises questions of privacy and conspiracy while offering potential for medical breakthroughs in memory care. The Candy House gives voice to issues of personal connections, love and family.
What Bix Bouton needs is a fresh new technological breakthrough. Known as a tech guru, Bix is now 40 with a wife and family. Pressure is on for him to come up with his next big, new idea to keep his company on the cutting edge of technology. Looking for inspiration, one night he wanders the streets of New York incognito and stumbles upon a discussion group of university professors. The discussion leads to the idea of external memories, sharing your memories with others in return for access to theirs.
This multi-layered novel references trends in gaming and music. Multiple characters are represented from different points of view and intersect over the course of time as the book progresses. The structure is unique and ground breaking. It took this reader a little time to adjust to the changing perspectives of each chapter but they are in keeping with that character’s personality thus making it all work well together. Jennifer Egan is an expert at weaving the plot and each character in a unique way that ties it all together in the end.

Thanks to Netgalley and Scribner for the opportunity to review this novel before its release on April 5.

I loved Manhattan Beach and a Visit From the Goon Squad and I loved Candy House, but less. Egan’s writing is effortless and intimate and thoroughly engrossing. This book is at its best when dissecting the intricate and incestuous relationships of it’s cast of characters, that come to feel like family by the end because we know them so well. But, and this is a big but, every time the book ventured into Black Mirror territory, it left me feeling cold and disconnected and mildly bored. Not because I don’t enjoy sci-fi, but because it didn’t feel like Egan was saying anything new with her envisioned doomsday technology. In the end, she does make her point about information vs. narrative and the book does wrap up all the loose ends into a satisfying whole but even so, the journey getting there felt rife with digressions into ethics of tech when the real story is the people and how their lives connect, diverge, intersect. But maybe that’s the point Egan was trying to make all along.

Writing: 5/5 Plot: 5/5 Characters: 5+/5

This is one book where the marketing blurb is spot on, so I’m going to quote from it rather than trying to describe it myself: It is “an electrifying, deeply moving novel about the quest for authenticity and meaning in a world where memories and identities are no longer private.” Own Your Unconscious — a technology that enables recording your own unconscious memories, and the attendant Collective Unconscious arising from the blending of millions of such externalized memories is transforming the world — for better or worse. In a set of tangled vignettes connecting characters who are, in their way, each pursuing the answers to their own existential dilemmas, we follow their reactions, reflections, experiences, and goals in this rapidly changing dynamic.

I loved this book — full of the complexity and layering of life where we are all spinning in and out of our each others’ stories. Egan has fantastic insight into so many wildly different characters — full of depth and quirk with none of the shallow explanations for behavior we (too often IMHO) accept in fiction. Each vignette is written in a slightly different style, depending on the “voice” of the main character — I liked them all but my favorites were those told from the perspective of a troubled (and troubling) child, one from an autistic perspective, and one told in a set of text / emails spreading out to include ever more surprisingly (to them) connected characters. I wish I had drawn out a character map from the beginning because I sometimes lost track of current (and past) relationships. If you read Welcome to the Goon Squad, you will recognize several of the characters.

Plenty to think about — lots of philosophy, psychology, linguistics, and anthropology applied to the social media ++ of shared memories and identities within a well thought out slightly speculative fiction setting. Some interesting multi-generational family dynamics and a particularly thought-provoking examination of the role of fiction in a world which has the actual recording of experience as opposed to those crafted by authors. Egan’s writing — as always — is flawless.

Some good quotes:

“He was known not to curse; his mother, a sixth-grade grammar teacher, had heaped such withering scorn on the repetitive dullness and infantile content of profanity that she’d managed to annul its transgressive power.”

“Gazing up at the lighted windows on one, Bix thought he could practically hear a potency of ideas simmering behind it.”

“I never know what’s going on, and because my attempts to find out lack the tactful goo that typicals smear all over their actions and words to blunt their real purpose, I come across as lurching and off-putting.”

“But whereas in music, a prolonged pause adds power and vividness to the refrain that follows it, pauses in conversation have the opposite effect, of debasing whatever comes next to the point that a perfectly witty riposte will be reduced to the verbal equivalent of a shrunken head, if too long a pause precedes it.”

“… no one escaped the roving, lacerating beam of my judgement. I can access that beam, even now, decades later: a font of outraged impatience with other people’s flaws.”

“In this new world, rascally tricks were no longer enough to produce authentic responses; authenticity required violent unmasking, like worms writhing at the hasty removal of their rock.”

“Social media was dead, everyone agreed; self-representations were inherently narcissistic or propagandic or both, and grossly inauthentic.”

“Here was his father’s parting gift: a galaxy of human lives hurtling toward his curiosity. From a distance they faded into uniformity, but they were moving, each propelled by a singular force that was inexhaustible. The collective. He was feeling the collective without any machinery at all. And its stories, infinite and particular, would be his to tell.”

This review is for an ARC of The Candy House by Jennifer Egan. I should start this review by saying that I am a fan of Egan’s and will, at this point, read her shopping lists should she publish them. That notwithstanding, The Candy House is her greatest work yet, in my opinion. She has abandoned linear storytelling for a gathering of connected chapters that lead the reader through the lines of many lives, each one linked by shared blood, experiences, technology, or philosophies. I admit that I was thrown by this conceit at first and stumbled through the first two chapters before realizing that they were linked in some way. By doing this, Egan emphasizes our human need for connection, a need that has spawned ever-intrusive yet irresistible social media platforms, which she has imagined to the extreme in this novel. While some welcome the digitizing of consciousness with open arms and minds, others begin to avoid it at all costs, going as far as to abandon children and family to save their own “stories.”

This is a book written for today and tomorrow, a glimpse at how easy it would be to reduce ourselves to algebra and algorithms in order to feed the inherent narcissism that today’s social media has given birth to. As Eagan writes, “But knowing everything is like knowing nothing; without a story, it’s all just information.” The Candy House shines a light on the stories that represent what so many of us are willing to sacrifice and reminds us that for as much as we crave connections, we crave stories more.

This was a really interesting book. I really enjoyed A Visit From the Goon Squad so I was very excited when I got this book. It started off really great and I loved how the story was told through interconnected story lines. I did feel that the story started to fall apart a little bit in the second half and it felt like the after that the plot didn’t really go anywhere and the ending felt slightly pointless. All together a fairly good book but not as good as A Visit From the Goon Squad.