Made it 2/3 of the way through, skimmed the rest. How this was written by the same author as the breathtaking Fates and Furies I'LL NEVER KNOW.

Wilhelmina ("Willie") Upton - a promising graduate student at Standford University - has fled back to her small, historic hometown of Templeton, New York "steeped in disgrace." The affair with her married grad school mentor has been found out, and, now pregnant with his illegitimate child, she hopes to find solace in her mother, Vivian ("Vi") Upton - a woman whose footsteps Willie has unwittingly fallen into. Herself a child of the free-loving 1960s, Vi had always told Willie that she is the pro...

In my reviews of Lauren Groff's later novels, Arcadia and Fates and Furies, I posited that Groff's writing is at its best when plot is de-emphasized; it's when she starts focusing on plot in a more conventional sense that things begin to go downhill. Nowhere is this more true than in her first novel, The Monsters of Templeton. This novel has plot coming out of its ears! So much plot, piling up everywhere! Ordinarily, this wouldn't be a problem for me; I'm a shameless lover of plot. Here, though,...

I had fairly high hopes for this being a fun, quality read. Nuh-uh. It has more than a slight whiff of 'chick lit fluff' about it unfortunately. While her descriptions have visual flair, the overall tone of this novel is cutesy and contrived. The multiple narrative perspectives seem forced, with several just feeling like tacked-on filler (ex: the running group. hello/why?) The main character is ultimately confronted (gently, of course!) as being the self-absorbed, spoiled brat/snob that she clea...

I won't lie. I'm reluctant to give this book four stars...but, you see, I have to, because I DID get up early to read it and I did stay up until two a.m. on a weeknight. Heck, if I'm being honest, while I did not stay home specifically FOR finishing this book, it made what would have been a pretty crap day enjoyable.But still, I'm hesitant to recommend it. I have this suspicion most of my friends wouldn't get through it. It was, at different points, many things: novice, tricky to follow, going,

If Willie Upton were a real woman, I would kick her ass. I considered drop-kicking this book across the room, but I have too much respect for literature. However, I define "literature" quite loosely in this case.I had all sorts of issues with this book, but my primary beef is with Willie Upton, a Stanford archeology PhD candidate and the main character. She goes away to Alaska with her professor and a group of Harvard guys to search for the oldest human on the continent. She has an affair with h...

IDK if i would have ever picked this up, but Karen is a very persuasive bookdate. And I'm so glad! This book is really lovely. Sensual, lush language; well-developed, totally relatable characters; a plot that is exciting and challenging, and on and on. As always, the fact that I am a quick and uncareful reader prevented me from really following all the historical personages and twisty intrigue, and I probably missed a few "Aha!" moments, but that didn't stop me from loving being along for the ri...

What can I say about this book. It is many things in one. It is a mystery, family drama, historical fiction, romance, and cryptozoology all tied up in a lovely package. And very enjoyable to read.The story opens with two plot lines. First a young woman comes home to a place she never wanted to see again. And second, a creature is found floating dead in a lake. Then the whole story diverges into a hot mess, but it is a beautiful hot mess.Even Big Steve (A.K.A. Stephen King) enjoyed this story. An...

I finally abandoned this with only sixty pages to go. Abandoned it without learning the answer to the central question the book asks – who was my father? Because I realised I just couldn’t care. And because I was unable to distinguish most of the many characters from each other despite spending 400 pages with them so it didn’t matter who the father was. Family trees are fascinating. I love that programme Who do you think you are? We’d all like to know much more about our ancestors. To discover t...

The author, a native of Cooperstown, NY has written a love tale to her town, renamed Templeton. The name was a nom de place used by James Fenimore Cooper for the town in his book The Pioneers. Wilhelmina (Willie) Upton has returned to town, pregnant, distraught, at a turning point in her life. Her mother had kept from her the name of her father, substituting a fable that fit the era of her conception. But Vi, her mother, is willing to offer hints, leaving it to Willie to apply her research skill...

Does this ever happen to you? When I read something, I generally hear the words pretty much spoken inside my head as I read them. Mostly . . . though sometimes, when I'm reading a truly great book, I start to feel that what I'm hearing inside my skull is more akin to music, almost, like some sort of lovely concerto version of the words on the page. But then, sometimes, with not-so-great books, what I start to hear after I've been reading for a while is more of an irksome whine or a grating rumbl...

God, sometimes I love my job! I commute two hours to and from work every day, and given current traffic conditions in the Austin area, you can go ahead and add at least another half hour to my drive home. I'll sometimes stop and grab a burger for dinner, going through the drive-through and then sitting in the parking lot to eat. I always have a book in the car, so this gives me a little uninterrupted reading time while I finish my burger.Most times, this takes 20-30 minutes. But every once in a

Maybe it helps to read mediocre books so you truly appreciate a good book when it crosses your path. 1 star=unreadable, 2 stars=sorry to have wasted the time but did actually finish it, 3 stars is a notch above that and hey, that's not bad for a first-time author.My complaints include: a plot that is driven by an only mildly compelling question, tons of subplots that have nothing to do with the main question and are boring distractions, poorly written fictional historical documents....I got the

You wouldn't know it unless she told you, but this is Lauren Groff's wacky love letter to Cooperstown, NY, where she grew up. If you really want to enjoy this book, it's best to relax and just accept it all in a spirit of playfulness. It's a wild and goofy collage full of secrets and pretend secrets and mostly benign 'monsters' and ghosts. Willie Upton returns home to Templeton after a doomed relationship goes awry. After she settles in, her mother Vivienne tells her that the story she's always

The Monsters of Templeton was the debut novel by Lauren Groff that was at its core, an ode and tribute to her hometown of Cooperstown, New York. The author states her wishes in the Author's Note as follows: "One winter when I was an adult and very far from my hometown, I'd awaken every night, heartsore, haunted by my dreams of my calm little lake. I missed my village the way I'd miss a person. This book came from that long, dark winter; I wanted to write a love story for Cooperstown.""My Templ...

yay!! my suspicions have been confirmed - i am officially not a book snob! i oscillate between thinking i might be a little bit of one, and that any forays i may make into teen fiction or silly bodice rippers that involve byron in some way are just accidents; flaws... on goodreads.com, i feel mostly like the dummy of the bunch, which is a totally comfortable and understandable place for me to be. but then at work, and in my readers advisory class, i feel like the biggest book elitist of all time...

Oops, I forgot to add this to "Currently Reading" while I was reading it. That is my fatal Goodreads flaw. Anyway, I breezed through this book in a couple of days; it is a very quick, smooth read, heavy on plotting, which keeps the pages turning. However, I think its self-seriousness undermines its credibility, oddly. In the end, I found the book awfully pretentious. The pretense in question? Pretending to be "serious literature."The novel revolves around grad-student-gone-wild Willie Upton, who...

Author Lauren Groff gives the reader a modern story, a fantasy and an historical fiction story all within her tale of Willie, returned to her family home, who embarks on a quest to find the identity of her real father. There is also a mythical lake monster and a resident ghost and while other writers may stagger under the weight of such scope, Groff juggles all story lines reasonably well. It is narrated partly in the third person by two main characters, in first person narrations of ancestors a...

Willie Upton returns in disgrace to her hometown of Templeton, New York (a very thinly disguised Cooperstown) and starts trying to unravel a family mystery that, seeing as Willie is a descendant of Marmaduke Temple, the founder of the town, is intimately intertwined with the history of the entire community.I really thought I was going to like this book. History and mystery and research! Weird, magical realism touches like the discovery of a monster in the lake! Multiple points of view, including...

About my relationship with The Monsters of Templeton . . . it's complicated. Before we met, I had heard a wide range of opinions about the book. Now, my tastes lean toward the obscure. I don't tend to read the popular ones and I have a bit of prejudice toward them. "If it's that popular, it can't be that good," I will sometimes (mistakenly) reason. And this book, well, this book had gotten around. The town of Goodreads had been gossiping about this one for a while, with opinions ranging from "it...