Even though I have slightly less than zero recreational reading time these days, I borrowed this fat hardcover book from the library last week. I'm about 20 pages into it, and loving both the premise and the style. It'll probably take me months to get through it.Hmm, I just read all the other reviews on this site, and wonder if I should have chosen such a deep and dense book to read in my snatched ten minutes here and there ... we'll see how it goes.11-19: Well, it took me six weeks, but I final...

Finally finished this epic on Sunday night. The sheer size of the book itself -- and the fact that it's a beautiful product and I didn't want to mess it up -- made it a bit difficult to lug around for subway reading. Anyway -- this story is phenomenal. I've never read a book like it, and I always appreciate originality, and not only is it original but it's beautifully written, the characters -- unlike this run-on sentence -- are extraordinarily well constructed (Pickie Beecher should go down as

What a chore this book turned out to be. It started strong enough that I stuck with the first few hundred pages despite the lack of significant plot development, hoping something in the overall novel would redeem the whole. But by the time I got to page 400 or so, I realized I had been duped.The premise of The Children's Hospital is pretty cool: it's a modern-day Noah's Ark story, but with a floating hospital, and rare diseases instead of animals. But unfortunately, and perhaps deliberately, Adr...

Oh Yeah, SPOILERS.A fairly strange book, in the sense that I never knew exactly where it was taking me. Two hundred pages of hospital melodrama with hardcore medschool level diseases and afflictions start this one off, albeit there's quite a bit of "Angels" and whatnot thrown in, plus the world ends. However, this doesn't seem to faze the Hospital peoples, as they basically go on about their daily business of trying to keep the kids alive and whatnot, even though they have a machine that will ma...

I think I’m too old for this novel or, at least, for its protagonists. Also, I found the author’s selection of details to focus on unappealing. However, for a post-apocalyptic novel (not my thing), the first 70 pages of this novel are fresh and clever.

A children's hospital is the only surviving structure after a great flood, and then all sorts of who knows what huh why oh why what a waste of my life happens. Ugh, even now, I think I would still read a book with this premise, because it sounds like it could be so great. That this book ruined this premise so thoroughly and in so many distinct ways is a feat on par with a magic hospital with an angel in the basement and a replicator machine, that organically opens up new rooms while upon the sea...

[This is as much an attempt on my part to puzzle some sort of meaning out of this book as it is a review, so beware of spoilers - not that this is really a plot-driven book, because everything that happens is pretty clearly telegraphed anyway, but you have been warned]They say to write what you know, so Chris Adrian, a “lapsed atheist” divinity student pediatrician, wrote a story in which God breaks his covenant to never again flood the Earth and buries the world under seven miles of water, spar...

The only reason I picked this up, and the only reason I stuck it out for all 615 pages, was because I was captivated by the initial premise of the story -- people marooned in a children's hospital post-apocalypse -- and I wanted to see how it would resolve itself. Maybe it was because of my attachment to the premise that I found myself bogged down by the huge amount of (very well-written) detail about the characters' interior lives and the activities of a children's hospital. These things by the...

Holy mother, what a slog this book was. Where to begin with my frustrations with this read. Okay, first of all, let me just get this off my chest: the novel is absolutely riddled with typos–not exclusively a reflection of Mr Adrian's work, but between the author and the publisher, the sloppiness is inexcusable and distracts enormously from the story that, as a reader, you simply want to lose yourself in.And about that story: the one element of this book that strikes me most positively is the ima...

It's hard to know what to say here: I have a distinctly personal relationship with this novel. I want a copy issued to every American, but I don't think I want to talk to anyone else about it. "Children's Hospital" mercilessly pokes holes in the shields we use to ignore what we do to each other and how little we think about it. Lazy optimism and contented abstractions crumbled.But despite how this might sound, the experience of reading "Children's Hospital" is not at all like slogging through, s...

This is a literary novel with science fictional, fantastical, and horrific elements. It’s a novel with overt religious themes that’s filled with black humor, curse words, sexual situations, bleakness, and just a sprinkle of hope. It is dark and funny. The writing is top notch. Some characters are chillingly true-to-life while others are wonderfully over-the-top. The author creates a true microcosm of the world in his children’s hospital afloat on God’s second great flood. He’s smashed a little b...

Let's start with, "...Oh, my god..." in a very, very good way. So good, I kissed its cover when I finally finished it. What - you've never done that?Now, first of all, I'll admit that there are a good 100-150 pages that could really be lobbed off the top. That being said, you must understand that it is these 100-150 pages that could either pull you in further or annoy you incredibly. Fortunately, myself belonging to the former category, there is a payoff to getting to know these people so well.

"I have such violent dreams, and yet they are never nightmares. The nightmare is the one where I wake up fifty years from now, happily married, and see a picture by my bed of the family I have happily fathered, every face smiling, every heart black with the sin I put in it."I read this book months ago and I'm still thinking about it, so I figured it deserved a bit more of a statement than just 5 stars. That quote above is, I think, a representative one from the book. If it resonates with you, th...

I don't even know what to say in this review.The premise of this book alone is one of the singlemost interesting premises to emerge from American fiction in recent years. However, I don't think the premise alone is enough to maintain the momentum for six hundred plus pages. To support this claim, I will tell you that I tore through the first four hundred pages or so in a day or two; it took me almost two weeks to get through the last two hundred fifteen. It just wasn't engaging to me anymore. Th...

I don't usually give a rating to a did not finish book, but this book was pretty unpleasant to read. It was joyless, and confusing, and it felt like the author was trying to make it meaningful by throwing a bunch of meaningful-sounding things together into the book and assuming that people would read meaning into it. And a lot of people did, judging by the reviews. I did not. There were angels, and an apocalypse, but no idea of a god. There were doctors and a hospital, but no notion of what heal...

I am struggling to get through this book, of which I have read about a third of. For a short time I found the chraracter study chapters interesting, but then they became routine, and the characters are lacking the development they should by this point in the story. I am also thinking that had Adrian written less about arcane medical terminology, I would be much more excited about this book. I don't have the time or desire to look up the diseases and procedures he write about in length. I really

I was reading this for a book club -- I couldn't get it from the library or as an ebook, so I ended up buying it, and I was quite excited about the idea. But I really could not get into it: the length didn't deter me too much, but the utter lack of sympathetic characters or action in the first hundred pages or so was a turn off. So I confess to not having finished this, and not planning to.I'm not the only one in the group who found it impossible, so I don't feel too bad about it. There are some...

This book was long and pointless. The characters were unpleasant and not compelling in the least. At the end I found myself saying "yes of course" and also "what was the point? What happens now?". One of the most irritating things in the book was the fact that many many things were written to seem to be of significance, except they ended up having no meaning at all. If this book were given a piece of string for every plot point or event that just ended in nothing, there would be a myriad of dang...

I hit the biggest brick wall ever while reading this novel. What could have been a wonderful piece of modern fiction was instead an overblown, poorly-presented, self-assured, long-winded and ultimately unsatisfying attempt at science fiction. To be fair, parts of this novel were wonderful. These parts were all contained in a young gay cruise ship passenger's diary, where he documents his sexual exploits in code using Presidents' names. But in the end, my housemate and I decided that we hated it

This is one of the latest offerings from McSweeney's Rectangulars. It's gotten a lot of press from unexpected corners, even including Oprah's magazine. And it is all deserved--this book is sensational. The plot is dazzlingly original, the characters are compelling, and the voice is just fantastic. This is one of the best books I've read in a long time.*****************************************************************(update:) I've just finished reading and crying both. What a stunning book. It is...