Aaron ThierRezensionen

Have no idea what I read. Just weird and wordy. Who cares?

This is one of those novels that I'd love to have read in an English class because I could have written a couple of papers that would have sounded quite pretentious. "The Dafoe character represents the eternal fallible nature of man." blah blah blah. As just a work of fiction, it is OK, but I'm not convinced that it makes whatever point the author is trying to make. (Not that I would have let my English teacher know that.) Certainly different, so maybe worth the read.

The writing is peppy and clever and the sentences clip along but the author made choices about story that narrowed the novel’s appeal for me, namely, making God incarnate kind of a boring character, and drawing on some not very interesting Old Testament tropes for the humor. A little disappointing because the premise was appealing.

I loved the premise of this book: Yahweh appearing to an American millennial and making her his prophet. To start with I felt the author could see inside my head, with all the contractions of being a self-aware, liberally minded person of relative privilege in today's messy world.

But then it just got weirder and weirder, and lost all narrative tension.

I wanted to like it, I really wanted to like it, because the premise excited my imagination so much. Long after it got dull, I kept pushing through, hoping there'd be a twist that would provide some redemption. But that never happened, and the more I read, the lower my rating of the book became.

Thier has written a sharply satirical look at the corporate culture of the modern college and further, a critical look at the system of injustice and general human ugliness that underlies it. And yet, he does so with absurd wit. His touch is so heavy, the dilemmas so grotesque,that I was laughing out loud. When a faculty senate meeting lurches quite cheerfully toward murder in order to deal with the revealed skeletons in a faculty member's closet, when an elderly dean goes "undercover" as a college freshman, anyone who has had contact with a college or university lately will be chortling. And yet, Their's satiric touch is sharp and clever. Definitely worth reading both for the entertainment value and for the sobering reflections on the state of higher education and our political/economic state in general.

One of the STRANGEST books ever...I love satire as much as the next person with a good sense of humor, but this should have been a McSweeney's article rather than almost 300 pages of collegiate and imperialist snarkism.

The premise is that a New Hampshire college founded in a poverty-stricken Caribbean sugar cane-dependent island nation aligns itself with the Big Anna (a/k/a Chaquita/United Fruit) Corporation and then allows the company to take over. Considering that the school was really lame in the first place, this doesn't seem to be too much of a tragedy until the school president is deposed and the New Hampshire (perfect placement!) students who go to St. Reynard for a semester of service find quite a surprise awaiting them.

Includes bogus emails, course catalog, minutes from academic meetings, etc. The best parts were modern day letters written in the style of colonial correspondence from the 1700s.

All in all, lots of laughs but ultimately too silly and way too long.½