Thanks to Netgalley and Scribner for the ebook. I was so excited to get this one being a huge fan of the author and this being called a ‘sibling novel’ to A Visit from the Goon Squad. This book starts with a character named Bix Bouton, a tech superstar, who will create a technology called Own Your Unconscious, that allows you access to your lifetime of memories and the ability to see other people’s memories if you add yours to the general collective. The book runs through dozens of characters who are in one way or another either for this technology or actively resisting it. It also has glimpses of a few characters from Goon Squad, but concentrates more on the children of those characters, all of whom are so much fun to spend time with. This is a whipsmart book that’s written in different styles and questions the technology we use everyday and the technology that is just around the corner.

It’s a rare feeling to read a book where the author is in absolute command, and a wonderful feeling to know you are in such sure and confident hands. The Candy House is just such a stunning, supremely confident book, and Jennifer Egan just such a writer.

It will be commonplace to characterize this novel as a series of short stories with connective tissue, but I don’t think that’s what Egan is going for here. Her loose-connectioned approach is in many ways her theme - that we are connected yet still mysteries to each other, that technology makes us more knowable while the true connections are physical, personal. This feels like a multi-perspectived novel in which each chapter, disparate as each is, serves a singular story.

Like in this book’s cousin, A Visit From the Goon Squad (which shares some characters), Egan plays with form, matching the right approach to the right character or chapter. There’s nothing as formally audacious as the PowerPoint chapter of Goon Squad, but if anything, her playfulness better serves this novel and seems a little less of a stunt (not to say that it was merely a stunt in Goon Squad).

I can’t recommend this book highly enough.

Excellent story! Totally engrossing!. Looking forward to reading more by this author! Could not put this down!

Jennifer Egan writes novels that seem to predict the future possibilitiesif we, as a society, continue in our constant search outside ourselves for our own truths. In this book, there are interconnected relationships among several families. The basis for their involvement with each other is the ability to spy on each others' pasts, if they agree to allow themselves to be spied on.

The premise is that technology has progressed (regressed?) to permit the totality of someone's life experiences to be accessible to anyone who cares to access them, if you sign up to allow your own memories to be accessed.

The individual stories told in the first and second person are interesting. But trying to follow the myriad characters and their real life vs virtual connections becomes confusing.

Thanks to NetGalley for the eARC.