Thank you Netgalley for the ARC of Jennifer Egan’s The Candy House. I have read all of her books and this one doesn’t disappoint. I’m always impressed with her style and complexity of writing.

What a fantastic companion to A Visit from the Goon Squad. I loved every chapter of this and have decided I'll read anything by Egan. Definitely will recommend both books.

This one was hard for me to finish. The majority of chapters were long and hard for me to keep an interest in. I also lost the connection between some chapters and the overall "story" that the author was trying to weave together. Not really what I expected based on the description of the book. Too many characters to keep track of and after finishing I just don't really see the point of the story. Just not a book for me.

I have been looking forward to this book for so long, and it does not disappoint. Jennifer Egan has such a lovely way of creating memorable characters, and as I read through their loosely connected stories, I found myself caring deeply about them all. The Candy House is described as “a sibling novel” to A Visit With the Goon Squad, which I remember absolutely loving when I read it years ago (though I’ll admit I’m due for a reread). However, I don’t think you need to have read that book to enjoy The Candy House. It's a stunning take on identity and privacy in our modern world and our desire for connection. I loved it.

I just reviewed The Candy House by Jennifer Egan. #NetGalley

Thank you to NetGalley and Scribner for my ARC in exchange for my honest review. This book was published April 5, 2022.

I read “A Visit from the Goon Swuad” in anticipation of this somewhat related sequel. I didn’t love that book (3 stars) and that should have been a clue.

To be honest, I’m not even sure what happens in this book. The premise sounded promising and possibly futuristic, with the ability to save and swap memories. But I found the book utterly confusing. And weird. And boring.

If it wasn’t for the ARC it would have been a DNF.

Thank you to NetGalley for this ARC in exchange for an honest review, and my apologies for a very late review! OOPS!

This was a pleasant surprise. A follow-up "sister" novel to the 2010 novel <I>A Visit from the Good Squad</I>, <I>Candy House</I> features a cast of various characters spanning 2010 through the 2030s. Just as in the previous novel, Egan trades between points of view and takes extreme liberties with the style. While there were no PowerPoints in this one, this makes it extremely intriguing and infuriating particularly when there are vignettes that are more enjoyable. The plot explores what would happen if we could download our consciousness (and subsequently maaaaybe putting it online for all to see). In its very subtle way, <I>Candy House</I> discusses what makes us most human and the complexities of what we share with others, strangers, and the internet.

When I first picked this up, I wondered why I'd requested this one. It's super confusing and nothing makes sense for such a long time, but it's also incredibly intriguing and smart. But then things began to fit together a bit more and it made for a very interesting experience.

If you enjoy weird, contemplative lit fic that requires a bit of work and energy to read, this is a great one to pick up. I wouldn't say you even have to read the "first" one first.

Smart and interesting, gorgeously written and tightly plotted. Intriguing characters that were developed then we spent no more (or very little/tangential) time with them. It all connected - but didn't have the sense of building toward something. Still - I enjoyed it!

This book started out very strong, and the premise is great. It reminded me of one of my favorite Black Mirror episodes, “The Entire History of You,” in which memories are all recorded and can be played back.

The Candy House felt like a bunch of short stories loosely tied together by a thread, that thread being an invention called Own Your Unconscious. Founded by mythical entrepreneur Bix Bouton, OYU allows individuals to upload their consciousness (their memories, feelings, sensations, etc) to the cloud. You can access and feel others’ unconsciousnesses too, but you have to give up yours in order to see others - capitalizing on our inherent nosiness and curiosity.

I was hoping for this tech to play a central role in these stories - for example, showing how its unique impact in a variety of situations that would be transformed having access to memories like this. But it was a totally minor background character, getting a shoutout or mention here and there, without actually changing much of the world of these characters (despite characters’ assertions to the contrary).

I really enjoyed the first few chapters of the book, especially seeing the way each narrator’s life intersected at a random point with the previous narrator, creating a sort of zigzag pattern of how everyone fits together. But the further into the book I went, the more convoluted these intersections became, to the point where I simply could not keep track of the sheer number of stories, timelines, and relationships. (It started out as x person is the cousin of the previous narrator and went all the way to x person is the son of the person whose dad discovered the previous narrator’s band and did drugs with him in the woods decades ago.) It got to the point where I found myself not caring about the characters - I think I would have cared more had the characters been more closely related or if they had not been related at all.

Finally, the writing style varied so much from chapter to chapter. Many of them are typical third person, but one is a detached second person story, another is epistolary, taking place entirely over emails/messages, and some of them just sound and feel very different from each other, not always in a successful way. These disparities left me a little disappointed in the collection as a whole.

Overall, I was hoping that the execution of this concept would have been a bit stronger - it started off well, but I don’t know that I’d recommend it. Thank you to Scribner for the ARC via Netgalley!

The Candy House - Jennifer Egan
Fiction, 350 pages

Jennifer Egan's latest work, The Candy House, is an inventive, miraculous piece of writing and impossible to fully capture in one review. The story begins with Bix Bouton (who readers might recognize from A Visit from the Goon Squad, Egan's 2010 Pulitzer Prize winning novel), a tech demi-god reminiscent of Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerburg. Bouton has developed a new technology, Own Your Unconscious, that allows users to upload and preserve their memory into "cubes" that can be shared with the "collective," a type of digital space where people around the world can access peoples' experiences. Each chapter moving forward is a window into a different character's life, incorporating some element of Own Your Unconscious into the plot. However, this technology is not the driver of the story. Instead, Own Your Unconscious sits quietly in the background as a type of quasi-setting - a reminder of the ever present themes of memory and authenticity in a world that mirrors ours.

 Although I have read books before where each chapter follows a different character but are all somehow linked together, Egan's structural foundation is wholly unique. Egan does not center the narratives around one time, place, event, or voice (indeed, one chapter is written entirely as an instruction manual in the second person in the mid-2030s while another is a series of email exchanges between different characters). Instead, as is discussed in the New York Times review, the structure has the feel of a social network, where people across time and space are connected in unexpected, wonderful, and often inconsequential ways. The Candy House blew me away, not least of all because of Egan's inventive brilliance. You do not need to have read A Visit from the Good Squad in order to read this book, but if you have not already you certainly will want to after reading The Candy House.

Rating: 10/10

I honestly can't even classify this book! Which is not to say I didn't like it because I definitely did. The chapters are so unique, and almost feel as if different people wrote them, with vastly different personalities and writing styles in each. Overall, it was a really interesting and unique read. I purchased several copies for the library.

I have loved Jennifer Egan since reading her The Invisible Circus. The Candy House is the first one of hers that I could not connect with. I cannot really give a summary of the book because I am not sure what is actually about. Occasionally I would catch a glimpse of Eagan’s writing that I love; however,, this book was too hard to follow. Thank you NetGalley!

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for providing me an advance copy of this book to read in exchange for my honest review and opinion. I have not read anything by Jennifer Egan previously and maybe that would have helped me but I had a hard time with this book figuring out what was going on. Lots of different points of view and I just found it to be a tough read. I was disappointed as I really wanted to love this book

I DNF this one at 48%. I loved A Visit from the Goon Squad and gave it 5 stars when I read it. I was so excited for this book but it’s just not for me. I felt so disconnected for the characters due to the ever changing format and structure. I know critics will say this is brilliant but it was not an enjoyable reading experience for me and life’s too short to read what doesn’t serve you. I liken this reading experience to my time with Cloud Atlas and Cloud Cuckoo Land.

I read The Candy House a few weeks ago and started to write a review several times, but each time, I was compelled to pause and rethink what I wanted to say about it. I'm a Jennifer Egan fan, so no matter what, I knew I would enjoy this book even if it wasn't something that I would ENJOY in an all-caps kind of way while reading (i.e., some of her books are more of a slow burn, similar in my mind to Donna Tartt).

It's been a minute since I read a Visit from the Goon Squad, so I didn't know if The Candy House would feel out of reach as a result. But it didn't. In fact, I think having read it but not being super "in it" still helped forge my understanding and appreciation of The Candy House. It stands on its own.

When I read descriptions of this before I got my hands on a copy, it felt like, oh geez, here we go with some high-falutin treatise on how social media is the devil, some story where I will feel the strident morality rise up like a preacher's crescendoing voice. Packaged in literature and sprinkled with powdered sugar, but still. Like I said, I am an Egan fan, so I gave it a shot anyway. I needn't have worried. The story was primary, not the social commentary. The character development was quite strong. I felt more connected to the characters this time around, vs. Goon Squad and surprisingly connected to all of them in some shape or form. In that sense, reading the book was eerily meta to the shared memory experience of Own Your Unconscious, the technology at the center of the stories, where people upload memories straight from their brains to share and to stitch together.

In that sense, each chapter which flowed from one character to another, was like living a memory, sharing the perspective through the eyes of whomever the butterfly landed on next. Or perhaps, like a virus spreading through the air or more like a demon transferred through eye contact, moving the reader on to someone who was either pivotal or tangential to the previous character's perspective. Half the fun was in figuring out the connective tissue. If you need to know very clearly who is talking and what their relationship to the overall story is, you may not love that as much as I did.

Overall, the central part of the story was the connection to technology and how we connect with each other — on one hand the Own Your Unconscious enforces a default empathy when the users see through someone else's eyes, experience what they have experienced. But on the other, it creates distance between us, this simulated/mediated interaction. And distance within ourselves. Memories subject to perfect recall make the narratives we tell ourselves subject to fact checking in a way that feels uncomfortable, at best. (Why, hello there, cognitive dissonance, my old friend!)

Overall, if you enjoy literary fiction that takes some chances, that feels fresh in its approach to long-standing issues of being human and what that continues to mean, stop by The Candy House and take a bite of whatever shiny confection part of the story appeals most to you.

About ten years ago I was walking home from the bus stop when I found a box of free books outside someone's house near the Art Museum in Philadelphia - I picked up a paperback copy of A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan that still sits on my bookshelf today. I loved the book and when I learned a sequel was coming, I couldn't believe it. I was even more delighted to receive an ARC of The Candy House courtesy of Scribner / Simon & Schuster.

Much like Goon Squad, The Candy House is a journey through the lives of many interconnected characters going back and forth through time, with a shared thread of memory and technology. I loved the different styles of writing the author uses for each of our narrators in each chapter, the style matching their voice and not one of them the same. I would describe The Candy House just as.... a cool ass book. There is really no other way to describe it.

I would HIGHLY recommend reading or re-reading A Visit from the Goon Squad before reading The Candy House. You can probably still enjoy The Candy House without reading Goon Squad, but they are truly companion books and are meant to be read together.

The publishers description reads "If Goon Squad was organized like a concept album, The Candy House incorporates Electronic Dance Music’s more disjunctive approach." I think this is a good description of both books. While Goon Squad flows from story to story, The Candy House jumps through time and space. The Candy House has a more solid thread than Goon Squad. Bix Bouton (remember him!) creates a way to "externalize" memory, making it possible for people to relive and share their entire lives. The stories explore not only the impact of this technology and the memories of characters before Own Your Unconscious."

I loved this book as much as Goon Squad. It was wonderful to catch up with known characters and explore other branches of connection. The writing is of course excellent, Egan really makes you care about these characters for the short time we spend with them. The book is both futuristic and nostalgic.

I’m still thinking about this one, trying to figure out if I liked it or not. But, the fact that I’m having to think about it is probably a sign that I didn’t exactly like it. 🤷🏼‍♀️

I reread A Visit from the Goon Squad in anticipation for this book since I’d seen that Egan would be using some of the same characters. In this rereading of Goon Squad, I somehow managed to love it even more, so I was puuumped for Candy House.

The book revolves around a futuristic sort of social media tech called Own Your Unconscious that allows you to revisit every memory you’ve ever had and those of everyone else. I think one of the strongest things about this book is the philosophizing on memory and the implications of them being public. What is our privacy worth? Do we know what it costs to bite the Candy House?

Between the two books there is an actual buttload of characters, which made it hard for me to completely pick up on who someone is. Unfortunately it was hard to latch on to a character and root for them when there was a new person every few minutes. The first half was a struggle and the second half finally started to feel like it was going somewhere. It was definitely more enjoyable once the book started getting deeper into Own Your Unconscious in the second half.

I know, I know. I should have tempered my expectations. But there are so many iconic moments in GS - the hot oil party catastrophe, the stolen wallet in the bathroom, the gifted fish, the genocidal General, and THAT PowerPoint. I never really experienced any of that whoa-this-is-so-original feeling with Candy House.

It’s still a great book and I love the whole Hansel and Gretl imagery, but don’t go in like I did with Goon-y expectations.

If A Visit from the Goon Squad revolved around the music scene between the late 1970s and 2020, anchored by characters Bennie Salazar, Lou Kline, and Sasha Blake, The Candy House unfolds, roughly, between 2016 and 2034, with occasional glimpses into the past, populated by the progeny of the cornerstone characters in Goon Squad, plus some close relatives and friends, in a much-too-possible dystopian tableau in which memories are a commodity.

The popularization of a technology to upload your unconscious into a cube for personal use, or to a collective pool—to search for something among other people’s memories— has raised questions of trust and the potential mismanagement of that technology in a sector of the population known as eluders. They have deployed proxy programs to pose as the online identities they have vacated, but that has created a counter culture in which those vacated profiles are sold, and where a hidden economy is afoot.

A Visit from the Goon Squad was formatted like a music vinyl album with sides A and B having, approximately, the same number of essays as an album would have songs. The sibling novel, The Candy House, is structured in four parts: Build, Break, Drop, and a recurring Build, with the first three parts having four essays each, and the last one, two. It isn’t necessary to have read Goon Squad to understand this novel, as it stands well on its own, but reading its sibling work first, may give the reader a deeper appreciation of the intricacies of the story, and the connections between the characters. Multiple narrators and narration styles challenge the definition of a cohesive narrative.

In short, The Candy House is imaginative, complex, but somewhat dense.

Disclaimer: I received a digital ARC from the publisher, via Netgalley, in exchange for my honest opinion.

Loved the perspective on our tech world, often questioned myself through reading if I should have read goon squad first - not sure if there’s a way to make that clear in the synopsis or to booksellers but I felt like it was still entertaining for me! Going to read goon squad next!

Almost a 5 star until the end disappointed. I know this book will be controversial, some will love and some will hate, but I mostly loved it. I read Visit From the Goon Squad many many years ago and vaguely remembering enjoying it enough, but not having strong feelings about it. This is sort of a sequel, but it's not really necessary to have read the first one first. There is some overlap in characters, but they're just a touchpoint.

This book will be impossible to describe. Each chapter is different, almost a world unto itself, until you start to connect the dots (which aren't even always there). I needed a map with lines drawn between the characters. But also, it's possible to read this book without trying that hard.

The general theme is maybe technology and the way it burrows into our lives, and what is the authentic self with and without it, and what are its effects.

So each chapter focuses on a different person and it can be a short glimpse, or a condensed view of their life, or current events. And it can take place in the past, or the present, or the future. See why it's hard to describe?

I think the author is brilliant and "contains multitudes" and can write in so many different unique voices that it's hard to believe it's one person. Fascinating.

The pitfall here, then, is that because each chapter is different and condensed, there are a lot of loose threads, no closure in many cases, cliffhangers that are challenging for someone like me who wants the answers. What happened?! And that's how it ends.