Customer Reviews

@Expectations

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This book is based on the concept of "Performative utterance" or "What we say...is". Translated to the world of computers, "You are what you type". To anyone who has spent time on the net chatting or in a virtual reality called a MUD (multiple user domain), this book will tickle your fancy. I have to give the author credit for a unique book and story line.

StElene's is the virtual world run by Suntum International. It is here that Reed takes us into the psyche of an array of characters that are diversified and interesting. We watch them manage their RL (real life), along with their VL (virtual life). Jenny AKA Zan to her friends on StElene's has become addicted to her on line lover, Reverdy. Stretched thin by night after night spent on the computer till dawn, she starts to confuse her worlds. This confusion, and what she finds herself driven to do is the substance that keeps you turning the pages.

I did enjoy this book enough to give it 3 stars, but I found the dialogue repetitive and sometimes found myself skimming over whole paragraphs. Worth the read if you have extra time. 12/23/00

What was I expecting from this book? To be honest, I expected a modern romance about two people falling in love in cyberspace. It turns out that @expectations isn't what I, well, expected. This irresistibly dark novel explores the strange and vague world of chat rooms. In this virtual world, people fall in love, betray each other, destroy lives, reinvent themselves. Which makes me wonder: isn't the term "virtual reality" contradictory?

Kit Reed illustrates just how surreal life on the Internet can be. Reed introduces Jenny, a wife and stepmother whose life becomes unbearable. In order to please her husband-to-be, Jenny moves from New York City to a suburban area in South Carolina. Depressed, she finds comfort in an online community known as StElene. Jenny, the unsatisfied wife, becomes Zan, a virtual princess who finds her knight in shining armor. No sooner does she enter this world than she meets Reverdy. They embark on a relationship that becomes more meaningful than her marriage. Soon Jenny and Zan's lives collide. Will she able to tell the difference between fantasy and reality?

This is one of the most original novels that I have ever read. I marvel at Reed's attention to detail. @expectations is not a sugarcoated love story. It is thought provoking and intense. You will certainly think twice about romance in cyberspace.

Jenny knows she loves her husband, Lieutenant Colonel Charlie Wilder, but has problems relating with his two children, Rusty and Patsy, from his first marriage. Worse, on the Manhattan mind of Jenny is being marooned in Brevert, South Carolina where her patients bore her with their southern tales of woe. More and more Jenny feels hopeless and trapped. She wonders if this is all there is too life? Her deep melancholy always surfaces when her marine spouse is deployed or on an exercise.

Jenny escapes into the chat room where she becomes the wild and free Zan. Relishing life to the fullest at the offshore island of StElene, each evening Zan meets her online lover, Reverby, who makes her soul sing. Over time the line between her life with Charlie and her "affair" with Reverby blurs. She struggles to separate the two and begins to lean more towards disappearing into the virtual world where life is enjoyable and fun instead of the mundane reality of responsibility.

Needing a warning label that chat room lovers beware the intrusion of reality, @EXPECTATIONS is a great modernization of the love triangle. The third party being an online figure turns the relationships into a combination of real and virtual. The story line centers on Jenny's two lives converging, with the sad refrain that she believes the virtual is better than the real. Think Supertramp's Logical Song and you have Jenny trying to recapture what she feels she lost. The plot works because the talented Kit Reed makes Jenny's descent seem genuine and plausible.

Harriet Klausner

This book blew me away. Jenny is leading a double life, one as a not so well adjusted pyschotherapist, stepmom, and wife. The other as Zan, a woman in love with her dream man in the Cyberworld. She walks a numbing tightrope between the two lives and soon finds them meshed into one. This book will put anyone back in reality who finds themselves lost in the cyber love pool.

@expectations is a book with much intrigue, much potential, and a modern topic. However, the intrigue is ended after the first few chapters, when the question becomes, "How *exactly* are Zan and her lover Reverdy going to break apart?"
It's written in an intersting format, going between first and third person, but that very format snagged my attention every time, noticing that the narration had changed.
Jenny Wilder, the main character, shows many signs of being addicted to the internet, which she admits, and neglecting of her children, which is "justified" and never put right. She never faces why she is unhappy in her home life, she just wishes to escape into a virtual reality she knows she cannot have, and somehow, in the end, she finds a way to escape.
The parts I enjoyed the most were very minor sub-plots, until one ended in an act of shocking violence that was very different from the rest of the book. It was a very stereotypical thing to happen in a book about online romance, and one I had hoped Reed would avoid.
I found the book to have a weak ending and a shallow plot. In fact, I never found the plot to be clear.
This book has a lot of potential. However, potential isn't enough to carry it along.

This is a wonderful escape from the typical romance novel. Jenny Wilder reinvents herself in a mystical chat room as Zan. Her allegiance to the other anonymous members in her cyber-world begin to supercede her real world, which includes a husband, stepchildren, and a career. The book is a deep, thought-provoking journey which probes the reader to ask if the virtual world offers more than the real one. Reed weaves a well-written and thought provoking tale!!

What a title! One can truely summarize the entire book by the title. Each of the characters in the book has expectations about other characters. By reading their online conversations on StElene's, the readers can *expect* the characters' expectations about others. Predictablly, most of characters' expectations about other characters turn out to be false in RL (real life). This theme is particularly well presented through Reverdy whose StElene's self description is something like, Reverdy is not what he seems.

This is a well presented cautionary tale on cyber community, or one can extrapolate the story into how modern inter-personal relationships can be built around expectations.

I liked the book very much. My only comment is that sometimes the online dialogs are too lenghtly. I don't think the book is only about love in the modern era. It is about loneliness. misunderstanding and attempt to hide from the life's problems. How often did we find ourselves imagining that we are someone else from a book or a movie. Now we can even play we are somebody else. Unfortunately, when we do that, we may go too far away and not be able to deal with real life. It is not just Jenny/Zan. It is also Lark and other people. All are unhappy and running away from their problems instead of trying to solve them. This novel is a good caution against unrealistic expectations.
I was a little disappointed by the deepness of the characters. I thought that Jenny does surprisingly little to help herself and her step children - and she is a therapist! But maybe she does not want any more therapy in real life!
I liked Lark's character. He is a warning to all parents about how lonely our children can be.

Kit Reed's "@expectations" did not live up to my expectations of what she could do with the story of a young woman who falls into an online relationship, despite a new and handsome husband. The book reads like a soap opera, trendy maybe, but tedious and slow-moving and unrealistic. This modern fable could be told in engrossing style, but Reed has missed her mark.

Sometimes love is more powerful when you can't see your beloved. This smart novel about an online love affair is intense!