"A Visit From the Goon Squad"

As we all know, I think the world of my kindle.  However, when other people use kindles I cannot look to see what they are reading and that drives me nuts!  I love to get new book ideas from seeing what others are reading on the T or on plane rides.  Lucky for me, though, there were a few people on the plane to Greece that had some hard cover books.  One of the books I saw and then heard so much about was A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan.

cover picture from Amazon.com

To be honest, I finally downloaded the book because I had seen those people reading it, but also because I started to see it on a number of best seller lists and figured it would be good.  While I do not think I am very picky about books, maybe I am (I hated Franzen's Freedom), but I really did not like this book.  

A Visit From the Goon Squad is a series of semi interconnected stories following different characters somehow involved in the music industry.  I did not see the stories working together very well.  Further, some of the stories and the voices I really enjoyed, however, those chapters often finished too quickly and moved onto another voice that may not have been as engaging.  I felt like some of the characters were just left hanging and their lives changed but the reader had no idea how or why.  

After reading some books that I reacted so strongly to, I think I like books that tell complete stories.  I like character development and seeing how things progress.  I need characters that are redeemable in a way that I believe it.  Watching characters fail without much hope of seeing how they get built back up doesn't do it for me. 

Obviously this book has been loved by many readers, I just do not happen to be one of them - not enough of a story for me.