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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
128 of 140 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Loved it.,
By
This review is from: Await Your Reply: A Novel (Hardcover)
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
Whoa, I really enjoyed this book. I started reading it this morning in between reading other books but all the other books got put aside as I had to see where this was going.It starts off with three different story lines that seemingly have absolutely nothing to do with each other. One story begins with a young man, Ryan, whose father assures him that he will not bleed to death as they rush to the emergency room with his severed arm in a styrofoam ice cooler. We later learn more about Ryan, he is Northwestern student who is failing all his classes and is undergoing an identity crisis of sorts when he discovers that the people he grew up with as his parents are actually his adoptive parents. Story number two is of Miles Cheshire who has spent most of his adult life looking for his brother Hayden who had been diagnosed as a schizophrenic when they were teens. But is he really? And finally we have the story of Lucy Lattimore who runs off after her high school graduation with her teacher George Orson. All these stories are seemingly removed and unconnected and I kept wondering what they had to do with each other. But each story is interesting on its on and that draws you in and keeps your reading. One of the most intelligent devices that the author employs is the fact that he never tells you the chronology of each story. You are never sure if the stories are taking place simultaneously, weeks/months apart or a few years apart. This makes for a very interesting story telling device as you try to find the connection between the characters. The author is also excellent in his descriptiveness. As the various characters make their way through America and beyond, you are caught up in their worlds and imagine what it must look like. From the decaying Cleveland suburbs, to the Bates motel like inn and accompanying house in Nebraska to the hustle and bustle of a busy African city, you find yourself lost in these worlds and their presence adds to a certain creepiness that permeates the whole story. I think that one of the most surprising things about this book is that despite the fact that there are mysterious and sinister events happening in this book, the book turns out to be more than just a thriller. At the center of these converging stories is the search for identity and the pursuit to reinvent oneself. As characters interact and intersect it becomes clear that many times you cannot escape yourself no matter how long it takes.
25 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
This novel sells itself...,
By
This review is from: Await Your Reply: A Novel (Hardcover)
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
As soon as you read the opening pages you'll be hooked. Dan Chaon's intricately-plotted novel opens in the middle of the night with a father rushing his son to the hospital. "Listen to me, Son: You are not going to bleed to death." The son's hand is in a cooler on the front seat.Elsewhere in the night, freshly-minted, eighteen-year-old grad Lucy Lattimore has just surreptitiously left town with her former high-school history teacher, George Orson. They're making "a clean break" together. The final narrative strand is the story of Miles Cheshire and his--Dare I say it?--evil twin. Miles has been looking for his twin brother, Hayden, for more than a decade. As the novel opens, he's approaching the Arctic Circle in far northern Canada on this latest quest. What do these people have in common? All of them have huge mysteries in their lives. Many of them appear to be engaged in illegal activities. From the start, the reader knows that there are connections. They are tantalizingly close, but nothing in Chaon's novel is obvious, and revelations don't come easily. The author plays with time, like an artist playing with perspective, to further obfuscate connections. Not all of the stories are told in a linear manner. Meanwhile, the characters explore the very concept of identity. And so many questions are raised... Just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean they aren't out to get you. Constantly while I read Await Your Reply, I kept thinking, How did he do this? He, being Dan Chaon, who has written a complexly-plotted and compulsively-readable thriller that is also a work of incredible literary beauty. Await Your Reply is an amazing accomplishment. You won't be able to put it down. Once you've followed all the trails and unraveled the last clues, you'll be blown away! What are you waiting for?
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
I've changed my hairstyle so many times now, I don't know what I look like,
By
This review is from: Await Your Reply: A Novel (Random House Reader's Circle) (Paperback)
I really enjoyed this book. I suppose that a big part of the appeal for me is that the concept of identity - who we are and how the world perceives us - is an idea that I find fascinating and always have. Even as young person I have always been intrigued by the notion that people can reinvent themselves. We do it everyday in small measure in our lives, choosing what information we share with others, exaggerating or downplaying past experiences when we tell anecdotes from our lives, or simply by emphasizing different aspects of our personalities in different social settings. We are constantly shaping the way people perceive us.Of course many people actually create new personas with fake identities and fictional pasts. In some cases, they may have multiple `personalities' and each one of these can become entirely real to the person behind the façade. It reminds me of lyrics by Hole from the song Doll Parts: "I fake it so real, I am beyond fake." This theme is central to Await Your Reply and it makes for stimulating reading. The novel revolves around a number of characters involved in identity theft. One character questions at one point in the novel whether or not leading multiple unexceptional lives could be equivalent to leading one great one. Ultimately the novel succeeded for me because I found its exploration of the concept of identity to be so thought-provoking. But it is worth noting that the novel itself and its three converging story-lines move along at a steady pace (for contemporary literature). Readers will find themselves speculating on how the story-lines will eventually converge, compelling them to keep turning pages to see how things come together. Fans of crime and suspense novels may find that the twists in Await Your Reply are not difficult to predict (they're pretty obvious - especially to anyone familiar with genre fiction) but I still found myself looking forward to the revelations that would come, even if I had a good idea where the story was going. The author does some interesting things with the timeline in this novel. The seemingly independent stories are told mostly in a linier fashion, but the story-lines themselves are not necessarily happening simultaneously. This was a stimulating and insightful novel, understated but very effective. The prose is top caliber. The novel caught my attention right away and kept me turning pages. The characters were all interesting - even if, in life and fiction, we never really know who anyone is.
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