'The Candy House' is not an easy book to summarise, because it doesn't have a clear 'purpose' or storyline. It is structured as a series of interlinked short stories, with characters introduced in one story picking up the narrative viewpoint in the next. It reminded me of a relay race, with the story passing from one character to another, never returning. My problem with it is that the destination was never clear, even once it was reached.

The book is a sequel of sorts to Egan's novel 'A Visit from the Goon Squad', which I haven't read. For much of the book I didn't think that mattered, but was more of problem in the penultimate section where events were repeatedly referred to that I can only assume happened in the previous book. But I can't be sure or know how much my enjoyment might have been enhanced by having read the preceding book.

Some of the stories I enjoyed more than others. My favourite was the viewpoint of a neuro-atypical young man working at a tech company and in love with his (taken) coworker. My least favourite was the penultimate section which was presented as a series of emails between different people. Even if it hadn't been for the irritation of feeling like I wasn't 'in on it' having not read the previous novel, reading email is what I do all day at work. I have no interest in reading a fictional set of generally quite boring correspondence between characters I don't even know.

Egan is certainly a good writer and most of it is easy to read and engaging. It was only really in the last quarter of the book that my irritation began to grow. I didn't even mind the shifting narrators and 'linked short story' structure much - and I usually dislike that device. Had there been a strong narrative thread with a clear 'message' and conclusion I would probably have lauded the novel as a rare example of a book where the technique actually worked. So the changing of the storytelling perspective is done well, what isn't done well is being clear about the story they want to tell.

Much of the book is set in an alternative version of the present or in the near future, where technology exists enabling people to 'externalise' all their memories and upload them. The tech has proved popular as a treatment for dementia, trauma and head injuries, as a way to solve crime, to assuage curiosity, and as a way for tech companies to gather data it can sell to advertisers. Some people, known as 'eluders', strongly dislike this concept and do all they can to evade it. The novel seems to be an exploration of the impacts of that technology, but there is no 'beginning, middle and end' to it.

So it's well written and mostly pleasurable to read in the moment, but ultimately left me unsatisfied. I'm a person who needs a good linear plot to really enjoy a book (with, as with any rule, a few rare exceptions). I didn't get that here. I would happily read another book by Egan, provided I had more confidence in a clear cut plotline - there's no doubt she's a good writer, it just happens that here I was less enthralled with what she was writing out. Readers who enjoy novels with themes about this type of technology, might enjoy Dave Eggers 'The Circle and 'The Every' which have similar themes but better storylines.

This is the sequel to the talented Jennifer Egan's The Goon Squad, with many of the characters from that book making an appearance here. In this thought provoking novel set in the near future, going back and forth in time, Egan picks up on threads from our contemporary world with the increasingly worrying trend of people providing details of their lives on social media without any thoughts of what it might mean to give up their privacy. The title The Candy House is a reference to the Hansel and Gretel fairytale to highlight and underline the fact that nothing comes for free. This is a challenging, demanding and imaginative read that requires close concentration from the reader, there are what can feel like an overwhelming cast of multigenerational characters inhabiting stories in multiple formats which intersect and connect, each with their own distinct voices and perspectives. Bix Bouton is an inordinately successful tech entrepreneur with his Mandala tech company.

A restless Bix in his search for new ideas listens to ideas, thoughts and visions of others, coming up with Own Your Conscious which makes it possible for people to upload and share all their memories and thoughts, in return they can access the memories of others. This has proved to be wildly appealing to huge numbers of people, lured by the Candy House, but not everyone is enamoured or convinced by this, they are known as the eluders, their scepticism having them trying to live off the grid, many of whom use proxies, the Counters are employed to identify and track them down. Egan thoughtfully explores the fundamental question of what it is to human and the too high price and repercussions attached to giving up our privacy, in her multilayered and complex stories and study of lives through time.

Egan shows how humans have an overwhelming and innate need and determination to connect with each other in this enthralling novel. This is not a perfect read, not every story captured my interest, but I liked how each story is part of a much bigger picture that moves the narrative towards the conclusion. A book that draws on the earlier The Goon Squad, geared to making us think about where our world is moving, and which touches on issues of memory, family, love and privacy, which I think will be appreciated by fans of the author and many other readers. Highly recommended. Many thanks to the publisher for an ARC.

I found myself being drawn into each story in turn and being frustrated when we broke off and moved to the next, but overall the story is wonderful

A visit from the Goon Squad is one of my favourite books, so I couldn't wait for this book, a sequel to that. I don't think this would work as a stand-alone, a lot of the emotional payoff is from our involvement with these characters from 'the former.
The Candy House returns to the lovely characters of 'A visit from the Goon Squad', in absolutely delightful continuations, all of them older, most of them wiser, all still deeply compelling. Her style of writing is as unique as ever, a swirling combination of her sharp insights, incisive humour and when you least expect it, tear-jerking moments of poignancy. 'While the earlier book revolved around the music industry, in this book, Egan trains her perspicacious gaze on the tech industry. One would think this is an industry that needs no more analysis, but when it's Egan, it's a completely fresh perspective, and so thought-provoking. Egan experiments brilliantly with formats, and narratives, in ways that would seem gimmicky if done by a lesser author. Drop everything, and read this.

I enjoyed the Candy House with its Black Mirror-esque take on the evolution of technology and social media as we seek to ever more document our lives and peer into those lives of others. It’s very easy to see how seductive such a tool would be to be able to look back over past events with clarity, re-play conversations with loved ones, and even see things from their perspective. The implications of this are then told across numerous different inter-connected narratives, all with unique voices and different stylistic choices.
Where I struggled is that there are so many different voices, the stories sometimes feeling quite messy and hard to keep track of. I can well imagine that is exactly the point, to mirror what the future of social media may well look and feel like, however, it did mean I found it hard to keep track of who was who and how the previous section connected to the one I was reading. I do know this is a sequel of sorts to The Good Squad, featuring some of the same characters so if you’ve read that then you may find it easier to keep track of the various threads.

Enjoyed the author’s previous book, but not this one. Long-winded and meandering. Few interactions between different characters even when when over halfway through. Love it when strands are woven together, but this one appeared to be missing a loom.

I read A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan shortly after it came out and liked it a lot; one of those books I've certainly recommended to people over the years, even though I rather struggle now to recall exactly what the book was about, its themes and the like. I just remember enjoying it and thinking it was clever and polished.

Which, without wishing to overstate the parallels - not least regarding my future likely lack of memory - is perhaps how I can imagine feeling about The Candy House some years down the line. I definitely enjoyed it, and found myself wanting to read more, though there were certainly times I worried I was missing something, or that in some way I was proving deficient as a reader, failing to follow the thread being laid out for me as diligently as the author might hope. Part of this 'fractured' feeling is, I think, rather deliberate on the author's part; other reviews will doubtless handily summarise the plot - if that's even the right word - or the sprawling array of major and minor characters who populate the book. And the more I thought about it, and also questioned my own skills as an attentive reader, the more I came to the conclusion that this is a book partly about what the internet has done and is doing to us, about how we act and interact, about what we value and are taught to uphold.

In places it's a bit like the literary equivalent of a Twitter splurge - or whatever is one's social media of choice - absorbing, distracting, verging on the gossipy as we glimpse what's going on in many different existences, simultaneously fascinating and inconsequential, branches going every which way as we are offered a dizzying selection of things to process (and perhaps prove unable to recall an improbably short time later). Or to put it another way, it felt a little like being Facebook friends with 'The Candy House', bits and pieces and digital chunks of 'experiences' and 'information' to which we are granted access as characters emerge, drift away, then crop up again as 'People you might also know'; a somewhat untidy, messy mosaic that approximates to Life in the Third Decade of the 21st Century.

In fact, Egan delves into a few years beyond our present time, throwing in some utterly plausible future technologies which in the book end up shaping how we (could) live, much as actual social media has relentlessly burrowed its insidious way in to our daily lives in the past decade or so. Most of us could never have imagined this before the technology arrived and became commonplace, and there's an interesting side-plot involving people, known as 'eluders', who seek to keep their experiences as their own, away from prying collective-consciousness eyes.

I'm not sure if this is anything more than a jumbled series of comments, but overall, I certainly liked it. My takeaway feeling upon completion was almost that of feeling a need to re-read with the benefit of knowing what was coming up; which could be viewed as either a compliment or irritant depending on your perspective about these things.

With thanks to NetGalley for an advanced copy in exchanged for an unbiased review.

I’m going to be honest, I just didn’t get this.

I’m sure it’s going to be huge, but for me I just didn’t follow it, found it all too confusing in both plot and structure and struggling with the multiple narratives and characters and lack of clear storyline.

I’m sure Jennifer Egan is a genius, I’m just not sure I’m smart enough to understand her work.

If Time was the oppressor in A Visit from the Goon Squad, then Big Tech (aka the internet and social media) is surely the villain in The Candy House but, unlike Time, it is far more seductive. So, when Bix (Egan revisits most of her old characters from the first book, as well as introducing their children) creates tech that can capture our consciousness, allowing people to share their most intimate memories and feelings, it is a huge success. Egan explores how this works in a society that has become increasingly fragmented IRL, how some people try to escape it, and how others capitalise or weaponise the new capabilities.
Egan's ability to write characters, in her inimitable style of intercepting and interlocking timelines and relationships, gives these two books their unique quality, but I felt that this second book was not quite as engaging as the first. Certainly the characters are intricate and credible, and Egan writes a great plot, especially given the complexity of the relationships between the characters, but I thought she was stretching a bit in this novel, to go one further than the internet/music conflict that we had in AVFTGS. Lulu's text/tweet story of her undercover spy assignment also read like a drug-fueled paranoid fantasy of Roxy's - I was near the end of it before I realised that we were supposed to take it seriously - and the very last series of communications that set up the iconic meet of Scotty, Bosco, Lulu, Jazz, Jocelyn and the Salazars at Lou Kline's old place, to create an intergenerational multimedia event, felt forced to say the least.
I'm not sure that any sane, intelligent human needs warning that our current use of technology, and particularly our use of social media, is exceedingly bad for us (there is very much a burgeoning trend for people to undergo "digital detox"), and so the fairytale warnings of the evils of a candy house (urban dictionary definition, a drug den), are hardly necessary - but Egan still weaves a mesmerising tale that will bear multiple re-readings, and reaffirms that only fiction gives us the "absolute freedom [to roam] through the human collective".

My thanks to Netgalley for the ARC of this book.

“Knowing everything is too much like knowing nothing; without a story, it’s all just information.”

A Visit From The Goon Squad, but make it the dystopian consequences of social media taken to its extreme. We’ve read this all before of course, but through interlinked characters and storytelling devices that once again change by the chapter (flashback, instruction manual, epistolary, email chain) the Pulitzer Prize-winning storyteller weaves - and weaves is the word - a cautionary, immersive, redemptive narrative whole.

It may not quite capture the sheer magic of its predecessor - in part down to its by now well-trod subject matter - but there are few writers out there like Jennifer Egan. Another one to get lost in.

This was a very disturbing but good read.

Thoroughly enjoyed from start to finish and could not get enough of.

This is a must read for anyone who enjoys a good thriller!!
Absolutely loved the characters, the plot, the tension - impossible to put it down.
Certainly recommended!

An interesting look at where we are going with the advancements of technology and some thought-provoking ideas about when have we gone too far.
Overall, I thought this novel was so cleverly written but I just didn't enjoy it. The plot didn't engage me and the characters just weren't complex enough. They felt quite two-dimensional. It's such a pity because I wanted to love thus and couldn't wait to read this.
I am looking forward to reading other re iews and discussing thus once it is published.

The Candy House is an extraordinary achievement, quite dazzling. The interlinked characters, the big ideas and the narrative energy is both impressive and, more importantly, very enjoyable. Reading other people’s reviews, I see that characters from A Visit from the Goon Squad appear here, which despite having read the latter, (albeit a long time ago), I had absolutely no awareness of. It didn’t affect my enjoyment of The Candy House... and maybe it’s time for a reread of the earlier novel.

A revelation. An engrossing read, intellectually stimulating and thoroughly entertaining novel. I found myself moved almost to tears, and laughing out loud whilst reading The Candy House, a title which kept me wondering in the best possible way. There are three references to candy in the book, and all three are of course pertinent to the narrative... a narrative which does not have a starting point and a final destination per se (although there is a gathering of strands). The novel is a series of self-contained chapters which move in time not chronologically from the 1960s to 2040 or so and posit a post social-media society which has gone deeper into other forms of technological connectivity and accessing (via externalisation!) of memories, personal or collective... characters appear, disappear, reappear... stories are pursued, abandoned, recalled...
This reader found herself caught in the particular problems/stories presented from the very beginning, and did not mind when they were followed by an apparently unconnected chapter written in a totally different tone, from a different viewpoint. The quirky writing kept me on board, online, on pointe.... I was trying to use my own brain to remember the difference between the Mandala and Mondrian organisations.... who was who in the scheme of things... Bix Bouton's technological genius v Miranda Kline's theoretical insights (both finding solutions in unlikely places), Lulu, Ames, Hannah, Jocelyn, Chris, Colin, JoJo.... the gallery of characters is big and memorable (Lulu is a favourite, as is Salazar's grandmother), the range of relationships and psychologies, equally so, the dilemmas (personal, societal, political) important, poignant, yet everything presented in what I can only describe as absorbingly interesting, never boring and always with a hint of (or full-on!) humour, with many a slight of hand. This house of candy, is very very attractive, dangerously so. Totally worth reading and pondering about.

With many thanks to the publishers via NetGalley for an opportunity to read and review this great novel.

I'm writing this review in-between bouts of screaming because this book is so good I can't stop screaming.

How. Does. She. Do. This.

A swirling array of voices that carry you along so fast you almost can't keep up, but you do because it's rich and glorious and smart, and oh my god, this book. It's a matryoshka doll of a novel, but the dolls are worlds, and they are colliding and splintering and, oh my god, this book.

It's human beings banging into each other, looking for connection, fucking up, being alive.

GLORIOUS.

I absolutely loved this novel. Although I had read A Visit From The Goon Squad 11 years ago, I didn’t remember it and the characters that reappeared here weren’t familiar to me but that didn’t dampen my enjoyment at all. This is more a breadcrumb trail than a novel, a series of interconnected short stories leading you on to the next one, reintroducing characters along the way over the course of many decades and only at the very end bringing us somewhere close to where we started. There are a dizzying array of styles and character viewpoints used here and I’m glad I could read it quickly as it’s a lot to keep in your head but it’s an exhilarating ride. Highly recommended and thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC.

Where to start? Fans of A Visit From the Goon Squad will not be disappointed (in fact a few of the characters from that book do pop up here - though I don't think it's necessary to read it first).

This is a big, rambling beautifully complex book which does a LOT of jumping back and forth through time and place. Characters are linked, crossover and intersect throughout the book and each chapter is told from the POV of a different person. The main overarching theme - a tech entrepreneur who has invented a means to download and store personal memories to a giant linked database that anyone can access - allows Egan to explore love, family, connection and the impact that technology is bringing to all of us.

I thought The Candy House, Jennifer Egan’s follow up to A Visit from the Goon Squad just wonderful. I would, however, hesitate to recommend it to those who haven’t read Goon Squad but since The Candy House doesn’t come out until late April, there’s plenty of time people!

There is a large cast of characters and, like in the Goon Squad, most get a chapter set in the past, present or future. Egan revisits some of her older characters or introduces their offspring, building connections. There are new characters too and I read the book closely to keep up with who is who, delighted when I picked up connections or had a vague recollection of reading about them before (it’s been eight or nine years since I read the Goon Squad). Memory, connectivity, authenticity and storytelling are some of the major themes of the novel and these play out on several levels. On the one hand, in The Candy House of the future, social media technology has advanced to allow people to upload their whole consciousness and explore their own and other people’s memories, for good and ill (and Egan explores both without getting too bogged down with exposition and tech speak). On the other, I loved how the book played with my own memories of the Goon Squad, scant as they are. I resisted the temptation to dig the old paperback up, for now but there was a prevailing feeling of familiarity, as if I knew these characters and cared about what happens to them.

Several days after finishing The Candy House, I’m still tempted to reread both books and am also still enveloped in a warm glow when I think about it all. Inventive, playful, multi-layered, just wonderful.

My thanks to Little Brown Book Group and Netgalley for the opportunity to read The Candy House.

Although the premise sounded just my cup of tea, the execution somehow fell flat; I have not read "A Visit from the Goon Squad" by the same author, which might have been helpful.

Of course, I loved this book, eventually. It took me a while to get into, which surprised me, as I've been easily hypnotised by Egan's writing in the past. In The Candy House, the character, Bix Bouton researches a way of storing human consciousness. Who thinks up these kinds of plots? I'll tell you who: Jennifer Egan. And it's only the likes of Egan who could make it work, what with all the switching of narrative viewpoints. If you know anything about Egan, you'll know how much she likes a lot of characters, and a bit of experimentation with the structure, but if you've read 'The Goon Squad' (do, it's great) you'll recognise most of the characters. So you won't be surprised at the way she handles time, and the way she uses chapters as linked short stories and contemporary 'tweets' to create a totally compulsive read.

To make something like this novel work - to push the message (not a new one, by the way, but still) about the perils of social media, you have to be an excellent writer, and Egan comes at this from a psychological rather than technological perspective.

Concentrate and you'll enjoy this one.