I liked this, but won't star until I check out the immersive aspect mentioned in the last sentence.

This book starts off engagingly enough but becomes hard to follow and, eventually, kind of dull. The narrator does a good job, neither hindering the text nor trying to make it better than it is. Ultimately, though, the characters are not very interesting and the storytelling is choppy. ( )

For me, the big attraction for this book was the location. While it is a fictionalized New York State, the local seems based on the ski areas of Belaire, Hunter Mountain and High Mount, place that were popular when, in the 1960’s, I lived not far from those areas.

The story itself moves right along with a forceful flow. It is a tory of not being able to recapture the past and is a very character drive story. I enjoyed the characterizations and the scenery, but the story was not that fulfilling and the ending disappointing. My four star rating is primarily based on the entertainment value. This was a CD Audiobook and the narration served to boost my overall rating, so deduct a half star from my evaluation of just the story. ( )

Luminous Tedium--Apparently, this novel is about a guy who moves from San Francisco to Thebes, NY to clean out his grandparents' house after their demise. While there, he encounters the brother and sister who grew up next door to his grandparents, of whom he has fond memories. Unfortunately, none of the characters in the novel are likable, and it was really hard to care about any of them. The novel meanders back and forth between the protagonist's current reality and his memory of growing up with the neighbor kids and his memory of his life in San Francisco, but there is no cohesion. Really, the only memorable thing about the book was that the protagonist, apparently, has a car once owned by Norman Mailer.

I'm sure there was a plot somewhere in this book but it was hard to find. The basic premise: At the end of the 20th century, a 30 year old computer programmer living in San Francisco finds out that his grandfather passed away. He travels back to Thebes, NY (in Norman Mailer's car apparently) to clean out the house because the rest of the family doesn't want to deal with it. Thebes is a tiny town where he spent his summers growing up. In Thebes, he runs into the brother and sister who lived next door to his grandparents and starts a relationship with the girl. This sounds okay but the book bounces all over the place--the narrator trying to find out about his long lost father, a homeless guy named Snow back in San Francisco and some historical research he did on the Millerites, a religious sect from the late 1800s who believed the end of the world was coming.

I didn't really care for any of the characters but stuck it out to see how the book would end, hoping for a big finish. I should have known better. Not a terrible book but I find it difficult to determine who I would recommend it to. ( )