Pan A Novel

Clune keeps the reader at a deliberate remove, forcing us to engage with it intellectually rather than emotionally. The prose is beautiful and endlessly inventive. "Bach is math class for feelings," Clune writes. That's how I feel about this novel. Deft and fascinating. Read more

This is not a book review. This book has high quality binding and printing. Read more

TL:DR: Mentally ill teens do lots of drugs, get really pretentious and pseudo-intellectual, dysfunctional families, blah blah blah, Something Bad Happens to most of them at the end, but we're not told what. The End. It's like "Less Than Zero" and "The Secret History" got blended together into a slurry. Hard pass. Read more

Does not pass the Bechtel test. Who knew that teen sex between 16 year olds could be so friction-free and enjoyable for the female participant? Oh, I get it. The perfect fantasy of the expansive “YES”. Also nice to know that a Russian mother’s influence can be so neatly short-handed to “dumplings and beet soup,” “those little Russian cookies,” and running a low level cleaning service for rich people. Nice to know the writer has done his research when it comes to Eastern European social mores. I made the mistake of taking this book seriously, based on fulsome reviews in the NYT and the New Yorker. Maybe I would have enjoyed it better if I wasn’t expecting it to be—you know—literature. Read more

I read to the very last page expecting this overwritten mess of a novel would make sense and deliver something the reader could connect with. This was like a nonsensical fever dream. No arc to speak of, no relatable characters. Wants to be a coming of age but just fails. Skip it. Read more

Remember those dice that you shake to give you writing ideas? This is kind of like that. Not exactly YA, it's like Percy Jackson meets Alice in Wonderland meets DSM... Read more