Customer Reviews

The J.A.P. Chronicles: A Novel

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(12)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(9)

 

 

With its bright colors and fluffy preview on the back, you would think this would be a light, fun read.
However, it is not, and I just cant understand how other readers can say that it is. If you are expecting a fun Shopacholic-like novel, or even fun interesting charachter novel, it is quite a dissapointment. It starts off innocently enough with one girl not seemingly to fit in with the others- havent we all felt that way? But instead of just being picked on, which is painful enough, she is actually abused by fellow campers. It goes on from there with stories of gang rape, sexual abuse, molestation, and neglect, with more than a few disturbing images. This book is packaged as one thing, and it in the end is quite a different thing all together. While it is well written, you can't help feeling at the end that you are glad its over, and that you were somehow tricked into reading it. Not a feel good novel.

Sweetly sour but fun and lively, "The JAP Chronicles" is an excellent novel that will fill your days and nights with sinfully good humor. Seven bunkmates at an elite (and I do mean elite) summer camp are filmed years later in adulthood by the subject of their childhood torments who has grown up to be a documentary film maker. We delight in the fall from grace of each of the seven higher-than-thous. "The JAP Chronicles" is a welcome recommendation that I enjoyed to the same degree as "The Twins of Tribeca", "My Fractured Life", and "The Starter Wife."

We all engage in schadenfreude in our lives. Its human nature to take pleasure in other people's misery. On some level even the kindest, most giving person can take some pleasure from other people's misery.

But in Isabel Rose's book, the pleasure the protagonist Ali derives from the failures of her sisters and bunk mates from her exclusive summer camp is almost sick.

This book also engages in the worst kind of schadenfreude. The kind where the person engaging in it denies it is happening. The Ali Cohen character is so "above" all of them, but yet this doesn't stop her from taking advantage of everything her name and status bring her. If she is so independent, why did she take money from her family for her education?

Why is it that all of them, except Ali Cohen, have something tragic happen to them, or have some kind of shameful secret? One has cancer, another is closeted lesbian, but Ali Cohen, she graduated top of her class at Brown, won a Fulbright and is still "a muscular looking woman" while three months pregnant. Every couple of paragraphs, poor, unpopular Ali Cohen is extolled as some kind of perfect person, while her bunkmates are made to look like cardboard stereotypes. We get it. Ali Cohen is so much better than them now. But if she really , then shouldn't her accomplishments make her happy? Instead she seems to purposely highlight the flaws of her bunkmates while extolling herself. Ali Cohen, Schadenfreude much?

I read the purpose of this book was to change people's perceptions of JAPS as money hungry, shrill, vacuous people. Stereotypes of any kind are wrong, but this book employs the wrong methods of getting rid of them. Giving the JAPS all cliche problems is not the way to do. Challenging them to open their minds or at least realize that they are very fortunate and making them appreciate that comes half-way to accomplishing this. Otherwise, all you have is a bunch of sour grapes over things and people that should have been long forgotten about.

If a person feels like they have been wronged by a clique of people in their lives, they eternally seek revenge against those people. They want them to be miserable and failing, but when you do finally meet up with a group like that from some chapter of your life, you find out they could be nice people and you forgive them for what they did when they were children or different people. Some note of this would have made this book plausible, believable and readable. Save for this, its just another cliche, predictable popular kids vs. freaks reunion book that is a waste of time.

This well-written but utterly empty novel "chronicles" the adult lives of camp-mates of Ali Cohen, the protagonist filmmaker, who had been tortured by her fellow Jewesses when a teenager. She decides to make a documentary that savages them as adults. The axe the plucky Ali has to grind is wielded well (in terms of the writing), but ultimately, all that's left for the reader is carnage.

Not one of these characters is likeable. Not one of these characters is believable/multi-dimensional. Rose is a good writer, but there is nothing enjoyable about the book. It's a quick read with good pacing, but no heart. You know from the beginning of the novel that it will end with Ali's redemption. What you don't know is you won't care by the end of the novel...and you may waste several hours of your life that you will never get back.

Part of my harshness has to do with the fact that the cover indicates it will be a fun, light read. It is not light, nor remotely fun. And the ugliness is not redeemed by anything...so you feel like a victim of bait-and-switch.

From the cover, I was expecting a light, fun, and funny book. As it turns out, The J.A.P. Chronicles was dark, depressing, insulting, and at times, vulgar and disgusting. The book seems to make light of issues such as gang rape, molestation, hazing, neglect, and abuse. From personal experiences, I do not believe that this book portrays at all what "jappy" sleep away camps are really like or what happens to "jappy girls" when they get older. How others could say that this is a "quick, easy, and feel good book" is beyond me. I agree with PaperBackReader's review, "You can't help feeling at the end that you are glad it is over, and that you were somehow tricked into reading it. Not a feel good novel." I would not recommend this book to anyone that I know. It was truly a total disappointment.

Totally disappointing. I was looking for some easy reading chick lit, saw the cover of this book, scanned the back, and checked it out of the library - thankfully I didn't spend any money on it. I hated it - around page 38 I was pretty sure this wasn't what I'd hoped it would be, but I finished the book because I at least wanted to know what happened. Turns out, nothing worth reading happened.

On top of that, it's full of a lot of unecessary sexuality (and in a disturbing way, not even pleasant sex) as well as a lot of bad language. The writing isn't great, and there's not really a story - just a bunch of stories that are somehow tied together because the girls all know each other and some of them are in contact with each other.

Don't waste your time - find another book.

Being a camp girl, I was really looking forward to reading this book and imagining what my former bunk mates are up to these days. I just finished studying for a major exam and was ready to get lost in a book. The J.A.P. world is not one I'm familiar with so it seemed all the more perfect escape. However, after an initial good introduction, the characters' personal demons overwhelm the book and the author does not do a good job bringing the unearthing of these demons back to the point of the book...the post-camp life defining moment in the women's lives. The individual women's stories get lost in too many details - often sordid - so the reader is left disliking everyone. Unfortunately, Ms. Rose doesn't give us much to like about anyone or anything in the book.

Although I literally couldn't put this book down, I spent the whole time reading it with a sick feeling in my stomach. I, too, saw the cuteness of the cover and thought this book would be light and fluffy. Wrong! Each character faces a most horrid reality and the reader plods on - hoping for a bit of sunshine to break through. Just when you think the story couldn't get any worse, it does... Despite the author's talent for writing - it was almost as though she was desperate for shock value. I know Stephen King wrote a book entitled "Misery," however, this novel would be more suited for that exact label!

Though a decade has passed since the magnificent seven were bunk mates at prestigious Willow Lake Camp, one of the them award winning filmmaker Ali Cohen has been invited back to film the hundredth anniversary celebration. She was the outsider treated like crap and tortured constantly by her six Jewish American princess bunk mates. In spite of her success, Ali remains haunted by what they did to her so she proposes a documentary on the pivotal moments in the lives of the antagonistic six hoping that God has punished each one of them.

Not long after the reunion, Ali concludes there is a God. Dafna no longer has daddy's twenty thousand dollars a month allowance, a job or a spouse. Beth is planning her marriage but desires the photographer not the groom. Arden resides more in rehab than in her home. Jessica is a wannabe actress unable to break out of regional summer stock. Laura is a successful talent agent, but struggles with a lump on her breast. Finally public enemy number one Wendy, wife and mother, hides her affair with a woman. Ali is ready to expose the seven deadly sinners.

THE J.A.P. CHRONICLES is an interesting relationship drama that enables the audience to see how bullying can hurt a person years after the events have occurred; people do not let go. The characters seem real and unique as Isabel Rose insures her ensemble has differing personalities that each retains throughout the tale. Though seemingly heavenly retribution to each sinner darkens the tale with overkill that takes away from the reality, fans of insightful character studies will enjoy this strong story.

Harriet Klausner

I got this book, thinking it would be lively and funny..... but it just took a weird turn and I stopped reading it. I hardly ever stop reading books (it makes me feel so guilty!), but I just lost interest once it got a little strange. Maybe if I had finished the book, I'd have a different opinion..... but to be honest, I couldn't even bring myself to pick it up and continue. Since I pride myself on finishing most of everything I start (including bad books), I really felt that this book was just not my cup of tea! AT ALL!