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pussreboots's review against another edition
5.0
If Joseph C. Lincoln had set down to write The Man Who Folded Himself he would have come up with something like what I'm currently reading. Fran, a small town chief of police, has found himself in the middle of a time traveling mystery / conspiracy where the fate of Crane's View rests on his ability to sort things out. The first chapter didn't do much for me but by the second chapter the quirky plot began to surface. By the third chapter I was hooked all the way through the epilogue which seemed like a tidy albeit somewhat ambiguous (as many time travel books are) ending.
ksparks's review
5.0
There aren't that many authors who I love. I realized within in a few pages that Jonathan Carroll is one of them. I had just spent a few days starting different books, and setting them aside unsatisfied. And then this book came along as a perfect example of what I'm looking for in a book. An instantly real-seeming, believable and lovable narrator, writing that is so funny and unique and true you want to clip all of it's sentences to share with other people, time travel, a surreal and mysterious adventure, and a love story (but in a broad sense, as in love of life.) This is a writer with a lot of heart and wisdom. I can't wait to read his other books.
nakedsteve's review
4.0
The story starts off with a one-eyed, three-legged dog expiring like an old wounded warrior, and then things get stranger and stranger. “The Wooden Sea” is a novel I picked up thanks to a recommendation in the “2003 Nebula Awards Showcase” as an example of the direction the fantasy genre was heading. And “fantasy” here means fantastical, not medieval.
I think if I had to give just one label to this book, it would be “surreal.” The book starts off odd, then gets strange, and then gets truly weird. The lead character, a police chief in a small town, was extremely well rendered, and shows some real growth both prior to the timeline of the novel and within the novel as well.
The novel does suffer from something I think a lot of modern surreal novels suffer from, though... Things are somewhat explained by the end, and the explanation seems contrived and a bit too tidy. Somehow, the magic of the bizarre needs to be left as mysterious magic, and when it gets explained, it’s somewhat of a let-down. (I got this same feeling from Stephen King’s recent behemoth, “The Dome,” but Carroll’s reasoning here is significantly better than King’s was.)
But if you like strange, give this one a shot!
4 of 5 stars.
I think if I had to give just one label to this book, it would be “surreal.” The book starts off odd, then gets strange, and then gets truly weird. The lead character, a police chief in a small town, was extremely well rendered, and shows some real growth both prior to the timeline of the novel and within the novel as well.
The novel does suffer from something I think a lot of modern surreal novels suffer from, though... Things are somewhat explained by the end, and the explanation seems contrived and a bit too tidy. Somehow, the magic of the bizarre needs to be left as mysterious magic, and when it gets explained, it’s somewhat of a let-down. (I got this same feeling from Stephen King’s recent behemoth, “The Dome,” but Carroll’s reasoning here is significantly better than King’s was.)
But if you like strange, give this one a shot!
4 of 5 stars.