Man oh man oh man oh man. I loved this book. ( )

The theme for this book is crazy. Seriously. Every character has their own special brand of crazy. Alice Black think she's going crazy after confronting a deer in her living room in the middle of the night. Former crazy talented head chef Pete Ross knows he's going crazy after attempting suicide a few times for no apparent reason. Unitarian minister Helen Harland has her own brand of crazy dealing with a mean-spirited church administration who gave her a lukewarm performance evaluation. How these three meet and deal with their separate brands of crazy is the heart and soul of the story. They are completely different people and yet. Yet! Yet, they bond over the insanities (my word) in their lives.
Alice Black is trying to get over a breakup with a married man. As she struggles to make sense of the lies ("For sure I'm going to leave my famous-actress wife...") she befriends Helen in the hopes of understanding the meaning of a frightened deer in her living room. Helen is desperate for any kind of friends and has a habit of pulling anyone and everyone, including the wife of Alice's affair, into her orbit. She hopes they help her make sense of her life. Then there is divorced and messy Pete who still lives with his mother, who still lives under the thumb of his mother. Helen insists on keeping him in her crazy circle of friends.
At the center of all this drama is Alice's great-great grandfather, William James, Henry James's lesser known brother. He is the key to spiritual awakening, with the help of a crazy medium, of all three. ( )

Two hard-luck cases make good and live happily ever after. Huneven can really write setting, but her characters can get bogged down at times (one in particular suffers from a bit of genteel ecumenical effluvium). ( )

It’s hard for me to put into words why I liked this novel so much. At first, I found the two primary characters-both souls adrift without much of a purpose in life-thoroughly unlikeable. They seemed so self-absorbed, so consumed with the meaningless trivialities of their own lives, so unpleasant to and suspicious of everyone around them. But then Hunevan cleverly brings on a foil, in the character of a female Unitarian minister who can’t connect with her congregation. She befriends both these losers and through her eyes, we begin to see these people differently, and we begin to like them. The charm of the novel is that the two character begin to feel the same way, and we get to observe their slow, subtle-but in the end, miraculous-change. ( )

I think some books are victims of our expectations. This book is one of them for me. I picked up this book based on the recommendation of a fellow bookseller who said he secretly divided the world into two groups: people who loved Jamesland and those who did not. A bold statement, to say the least, so when I went into the book, I expected to either have a transcendent experience, or, well, hate it. This book was neither of these things for me. It was a nice book. A really, really, really nice book. It's very well written, has well-drawn characters, and delivers that holy grail of literary fiction--a happy ending. Was it a transformative experience? No. But I liked it. I would recommend it to others. But having had it put so high on a pedestal by an acquaintance, I couldn't help but be disappointed in the end, which is a little sad.

The one concrete thing I will say about the book itself is that I'm not sure I fully believed the final plot developments (i.e., the happy ending). I wanted to, out of allegiance to the characters of whom I'd grown fond, but I didn't quite trust it. Which is interesting, considering the themes of this book, which is essentially about religion and belief, but without any grand conversions. Really, the characters don't learn how to believe, but how to live. I'm just not sure I completely believed how they got there. ( )