lmc168's review
3.0
I didn't love this. There were parts I really liked, especially toward the beginning, but overall I was disappointed. I didn't like how the timeline jumped around, but I think most of my disappointment came from not liking any of the people in the book. There was no one, the author included, who I really rooted for or cared strongly about.
sde's review
3.0
This book was hard to rate. I found parts of it laugh-out-loud funny, and I'm sure I annoyed my family as I read passage after passage out loud to them while I we were on a trip to the beach. But sometimes the author was kind of annoying - I get why his mentor broke up with him. I enjoyed the narrative of his years through college much more than the post-college stuff where I just felt like telling him to pull himself together and look outward once in a while. I did feel for him and his horrible time fitting in at Solomon Schechter School of Queens. It was great when he finally found his people at Stuyvesant, but, well, otherwise his narrative isn't much of an advertisement for that school!
I think I would like his fiction more than the memoir since I know that it is, um, fiction, even the books that are based on his life. It gives the reader a little more distance to enjoy the story, and I don't have to feel so bad for his parents being exposed like they are in their memoir. Yeah, they were not perhaps the best parents, and some of the ways the author depicts them is funny, but at times they come off as more awful even though they were just trying to make a new life in a new place after being almost totally cut off from their homeland. I do love how by the end they have all come to terms with each other, quirks and all.
I think I would like his fiction more than the memoir since I know that it is, um, fiction, even the books that are based on his life. It gives the reader a little more distance to enjoy the story, and I don't have to feel so bad for his parents being exposed like they are in their memoir. Yeah, they were not perhaps the best parents, and some of the ways the author depicts them is funny, but at times they come off as more awful even though they were just trying to make a new life in a new place after being almost totally cut off from their homeland. I do love how by the end they have all come to terms with each other, quirks and all.
pmhennen's review against another edition
2.0
it was okay. there were points were i enjoyed it but mostly it just dragged on. definitely a hard one to finish.
cook_memorial_public_library's review
4.0
Andrea calls novelist Gary Shteyngart's memoir funny and honest. Read her review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/864846841?book_show_action=false&page=1
Check our catalog: http://encore.cooklib.org/iii/encore/search/C__Slittle%20failure%3A%20a%20memoir__Orightresult__U?lang=eng&suite=pearl
Check our catalog: http://encore.cooklib.org/iii/encore/search/C__Slittle%20failure%3A%20a%20memoir__Orightresult__U?lang=eng&suite=pearl
jenniferk's review
3.0
Story line spiraled a little much for me.
However, tension between the parents' and child as they immigrant and navigate a new culture reminded me of my students. Great book in that regard.
However, tension between the parents' and child as they immigrant and navigate a new culture reminded me of my students. Great book in that regard.
chelseamartinez's review
4.0
I'm completely biased here, because the Oberlin chapter here is hilarious. Shteyngart *has* really drawn on his own life in several books but I still enjoyed hearing the autobiographical version. The reveal in the last chapter was genuinely surprising to me.
lazygal's review
1.0
There are so many bad jokes one could make about the title of the book and the fact that it was a DNF but I'll be good. Suffice it to say that there was nothing in what I read that made me care about the author or his life: he seemed too self-satisfied and too smugly humorous for my liking.