A review by christar_123
Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan

2.0

I wanted to really like this book, because I thought "A Visit from the Goon Squad" was great. In some ways, I think Egan dwelt on similar themes here, but put them into a historic context - ideas about family, guilt, fathers and more. But it was just kind of boring. I never really felt like I got connected to the characters and kind of couldn't figure out some of them. I wanted to like Anna but she felt like a 2-D character. Like Egan wanted to write a strong female character but just kind of left it at that....I don't know how to explain it. I often like writing styles where we infer a character's personality and feelings from the dialogue and actions rather than actual descriptions of the person (Hemingway-ish, and I think we see this in Towles's novels too), but it just didn't work here.

I got annoyed with the jumps in time and fractured timeline too. I guess the mystery aspect of the story wasn't engaging enough for me to be amused.