I reread Goon Squad in preparation for this book and was glad I did because first, I had forgotten how great Goon Squad was and second, it gave context for the development of the characters in this brilliant sequel. Egan has imagined a future that is creative, plausible and a little scary where technology allows one to access and “share” with others (ala Facebook) every memory one has ever had. She tells her characters’ stories in a wonderful mélange of styles and humor. In addition to being a seriously cautionary tale, this is one compelling read.

while well written and compelling in theory, it's a bit too complicated to be truly emotionally resonant. for me at least

I highlighted this book on my Booktube channel. The video can be accessed here: https://youtu.be/K37OlI8KPz4

This is a serious of interconnected stories but unfortunately after putting the book down, I had trouble picking it back up and following the string. The jumps in time line and various characters left me having a difficult time connecting them all.

Thank you to NetGalley and Scribner for letting me receive an ebook in exchange for an honest review.

I really hate DNFing arcs that I requested but I really didn’t care about the story, characters or the themes. I don’t have a lot to say other than I get what the author was trying to say but I don’t think she did a good job of saying it.

1/5

I loved the author's previous book! LOVED it. So I was extremely thrilled to have been approved for this book.

The Candy House by Jennifer Egan was a really unique read. The book is told not only from different characters, on different timelines, but also in completely different formats. Not all the characters are connected as in a typical story but the point is that thanks to the Mandala everyone is connected in some way or another.
The overarching concept is a tech product (Mandala) is invented where people can download and share their entire consciousness & mental history.
The potential of this idea - "tens of thousands of crimes solved; child pornography all but eradicated; Alzheimer's and dementia sharply reduced by reinfusions of saved healthy consciousness; dying languages preserved and revived; a legion of missing persons found; and a global rise in empathy that accompanied a sharp decline in purist orthodoxies"
But what do we humans do with it? We get addictions, public shaming, stalkers & next-level government infringement of basic human rights.
When I stopped trying to connect all the stories and instead treated each chapter as a viewing of someone's consciousness, I enjoyed the book even more.
Nosey neighbours, female spies, drug counselling via D&D - all very entertaining & endearing.
My favourite chapter was about the summer day spent by a group of teenagers before social media & tech took over - riding bikes, staring at clouds, flirting with a crush - that chapter read so true and brought so much nostalgia.
"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."

This contemporary fiction/sci-fi work was a fantastic read. For those wanting a highbrow, rabbit-hole read with a whole lot to say about society today and where we are heading, this one is for you. An intricate maze of many (MANY) characters that are all somehow connected and yet totally disconnected, The Candy House uniquely summarizes our world today-disconnected connectedness.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publishers for sending a digital ARC in exchange for an honest review.

A candy house is just what it sounds like—a house made of candy to entice the young. They thought the candy was free, but it has a price. In Jennifer Egan’s sprawling new novel, “The Candy House,” a “sibling novel” to her Pulitzer Prize-winning “A Visit From the Goon Squad,” that metaphorical house is a piece of technology called “Own Your Own Subconscious.” “By uploading all or part of your externalized memory to an online ‘collective’ you gained proportionate access to the anonymous thoughts and memories of everyone in the world, living or dead, who had done the same.” In this post-privacy world, only a few maintain their right not to share every thought and experience they ever had. This new technology is, in effect, the opposite of what we have in today’s social media, where users (us!) try to put the most glamorous version of our lives online for public consumption.

Reading “A Visit From the Goon Squad” shouldn’t be a prerequisite for Egan’s latest offering, but it wouldn’t hurt. This reviewer wishes she had indulged in a quick re-read, just to keep the many characters straight. Undoubtedly, readers will have favorites that they remember from that decade-old book—for me, it was the lovable child, Lincoln, of the famous, unexpectedly emotional “power-point chapter,” and of course, La Doll, the publicist who tried to improve the image of a genocidal general. Many characters return, and, in some cases, their children. Egan continues to delight in her inventive use of narrative form. Characters might occupy whole chapters and perhaps never be seen again, however much you might like to know the rest of their story. She cleverly threads everyone together, either by blood or marriage or the long fingers of Lou’s career, or by sparking an idea or filling an empty hole of yearning. So many of her characters are searching for a place of belonging, often using the Consciousness Cube as a means to locate a distant memory where they felt truly loved. Nostalgia runs deep for this group, as it does for us all. Bennie Salazar, a music executive, goes so far to say “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.” Bennie is happy to take advantage of the human desire to recapture the past by relaunching a band that broke up decades ago, but he also helps us pause and consider the ramifications of nostalgia. What do we lose when we lean into its warm embrace?

Authenticity has a high value in this ever-so-slightly futuristic world. “Social media was dead, everyone agreed; self-representations were inherently narcissistic or propagandic or both and grossly inauthentic.” Alfred Hollander’s method of finding authenticity is to scream in crowds (trains, elevators) for the pleasure of watching those nearby react without the carefully designed masks they usually carry. Without filters, in other words. Alfred, like a Holden Caulfield for our age, has been crusading against phonies since he was a child. “By age nine, Alfred’s intolerance of fakery had jumped the life/art barrier and entered the everyday world. He’d looked behind the curtain and seen the ways people played themselves, or—more insidiously—versions of themselves they’d cribbed from TV: Harried Mom. Sheepish Dad. Stern Teacher. Encouraging Coach.” Alfred releases one of his primal screams on a bus in Chicago (local readers will not be surprised that this action is quickly squelched by the unperturbed driver). As Egan unravels the importance of authenticity with a technology that feels all too feasible, what really stands out are the integral connections these people long to create. This fiercely intellectual book is full of heart, love and redemption. (Kelly Roark)

“The Candy House”
By Jennifer Egan
Scribner, 352 pages

This is the dazzling second volume of the "Goon Squad" series, following Egan's brilliant "A Visit from the Goon Squad". This one stands alone but it's fun to reread it, as I did, to see the full tapestry. This one opens with Bix Boulton who has invented a way to download and share memories. Memory is a big theme here, as is history, relationships and very creative character development, many of whom appeared in the first volume. Highly recommended.

The Candy House is a triumph. Interweaving stories in a manner that honors each individual character’s unique perspective, the writing style feels fresh and creative. The commentary of modernity, cliches, collective consciousness, and being careful what you wish for hums on every page. I particularly loved how each chapter referenced a character we’d learned about before, but didn’t give a name until after we had formed a picture of them from this new perspective—this helped challenge my preconceived notions as a reader, and gave me the sense of experiencing the world from the eyes of others (a major theme of the storyline).

Jennifer Egan has a gift for threading together a host of characters in a meaningful and memorable way, often to tell a cautionary tale, which The Candy House certainly is. It is a must read for our decade.

This one has already been named one of the best books of 2022, so I will just echo that sentiment here: This is one of the best books of 2022.

Jennifer Egan's brain just works in a different way than most humans, and we are so incredibly lucky for it. A set of interconnected stories that will have the reader flipping back and forth and rereading and exclaiming with delight when they recognize someone from a few chapters ago, "The Candy House" is cerebral and emotional all at once.

So I just finished The Candy House and I am hungry to find friends who've read it so that I can hash out all of my thoughts. I don't even know how I feel about any of it and I kinda like that I am this mixed up. On the one had, I really loved the episodic, non-linear experimental way that Jennifer Egan put this together (having not read her other works, I've heard this is just her style?). It kept me on my toes and forced me to stop trying to read it in my normal way. I had to give myself permission to not try and connect all the dots and know all the things; I had to relax and enjoy it for the journey that it was. As much as I enjoyed that, I also was uncomfortable with it. I didn't always like not knowing how the puzzle pieces fit and I hated thinking I was missing something or that I was missing the point because I couldn't see the small picture inside the bigger one.

Days later, I'm still pondering all the things that The Candy House brought up about technology and relationships and how those work separately and together, about the ripple effect of relationships and how one innocuous moment can influence the entire life of someone, about how the more we progress, we sometimes seem to regress, and maybe at the heart of all of this the ideas of loneliness and grief and loss and desire and love and connection.

I've talked two of my colleagues and friends into reading The Candy House and I cannot wait to hear what they think and why they think it.

The Candy House by Jennifer Egan is an amazing book that makes you not want to put down. Awesome read.

Wow! Jennifer Egan does it again with her king-awaited follow-up to Goon Squad. The connections between characters and the intricacies of those connections are masterfully unspooled before the reader. Egan is a genius.

I received this book to offer it as a book club read. However, I and the group couldn't get into this one. "A Visit from the Goon Squad" is still one of my favs, but this didn't hit me.

Jennifer Egan's The Candy House is the long-awaited follow-up novel to A Visit from the Goon Squad. Many of the characters overlap in this set of linking stories.

Many thanks to the author, publisher, and NetGalley for sharing this book with me. All thoughts are my own.

Interconnected stories from the 1970s-2030s, many featuring a Facebook-like invention where people can upload their unconsciousness for others to experience and the resistance to this technology.

After reading and loving A Visit From the Goon Squad, I was looking forward to reading this follow up from Egan.

I loved how she told each chapter from a different character’s perspective so the reader could see the trickle down effect that this new technology had on various people.

I also think she did the whole “tech future” in a really thoughtful way. It was scary to think about a future in which technology companies have so much hold over our memories, but it’s not unthinkable. She made that world feel real and tangible.

While the book utilizes characters from the previous work, A Visit from the Goon Squad, you can still enjoy this book without reading the previous. I liked the interconnecting stories and while some felt repetitive, overall it was a good technique. I felt the book came of a little “preachy” at times.

Jennifer Egan writes as fluidly and thoughtfully as always in The Candy House, though this was probably my least favorite among her books to date.

I’ll start by saying that while this is technically a sequel to A Visit from the Goon Squad, it doesn’t really feel like one. It’s more like a companion novel with a few characters in common. This in itself isn’t a problem, but something readers may want to be aware of.

I didn’t love the Speculative Fiction aspect of this. But I also don’t love Speculative Fiction in general, and if you do, you’ll likely enjoy this more than I did.

And while the large cast of characters is interesting to an extent and Egan weaves their stories together well, it’s hard to care much about any of them because we don’t stay with them long enough to truly invest. Most of them didn’t interest me much anyway, except for the empiricist, who was delightful.

Egan’s writing is lovely as always, but plot wise this wasn’t my favorite. I still think The Keep is her best work and would recommend that above all the others, but Manhattan Beach and the original Goon Squad novel are great as well.