What is Jennifer Egan's The Candy House about? Well, to be perfectly honest with you, I don't know. This is not a novel told in a traditional way. Nor does it focus on one set of main characters throughout the whole book. Instead, you hear the stories of multiple characters whose lives do get tangled up together, and somehow all of their lives end up having something to do with emerging technology that collects people's memories and uploads them to a "cloud".
While I found most of the chapters interesting on their own, I wasn't a huge fan of the way the book was organized. There's a lot of back and forth on the timeline, which was hard to keep track of, and there are a lot of characters, which were hard to keep track of. Just when you start getting invested in one character, you'll really never hear from him or her again.
It's all just very...strange.
And the background to all of these stories is the technology program Own Your Unconscious, which allows people to upload their memories to a "cloud" and share them with other users and view other users' memories. I really wanted the development of the technology to be more of a bigger story, but I can see how the author just wanted to show the ways the technology affected people's lives for good or bad.
And what to make of the novel's title? It's a reference to the witch luring Hansel and Gretel with her house made of candy. Be careful because some things are too good to be true. And there's a little bit of that in terms of what happens with this Own Your Unconcsious and other technological advancements in the book.
Not to mention that apparently some of the book's characters are also from Egan's first novel A Visit from the Goon Squad, which I have not read, so I don't know if I'm missing something by coming into this "series" in the second book.
This novel will not be everyone's cup of tea. I wanted the story to be more linear with a bigger focus on how the technology came to be, BUT I still think there would be a lot for a book club to discuss with this. Sometimes the books we don't like as much are the ones that prompt the best discussions, right?
The Candy House is published by Scribner and will be available to purchase tomorrow (4/5/22). I received a free advance review copy.
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