Rating: 
Summary: great, but it leaves you mad
Review: It's a great book, but it leaves you mad because the best character in the book, Clay, gets screwed around so much. I wish he'd have been able to get back with Bacon. And Kavalier was kind of a jerk. Good book though.
Rating: 
Summary: It's not about comics!
Review: Sometimes I wonder when people write these reviews. After the first or second chapter?
Regarding the Aprill 11 review from Ashland Oregan who wrote: "To me a hero isn't someone who can leap tall building but, rather, someone who overcomes personal demons to become a stronger person who can care for other people." Read the whole book. It IS about precisely that, overcoming personal demons and caring for people.
The characters in this book are extremely rich, and grow and change alot, and I mean alot, through this wonderfully entertaining book. It is a book about people and relationships, America during a particular time, making choices and facing consequences. Sure there is alot of comics stuff, but that is the vehicle, not the story. This is a truly great book.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent Tale of Success & Loss
Review: Initially, I was skeptical that I could enjoy this book; I have absolutely no interest in comic books, and know very little about them.
However, comic books are only part of this rich tale.
Interspersed in the story of two boys' rise to fame and success, romance and life lessons linger.
Additionally, Michael Chabon also incorporated some historical facts into this gem of a novel, with a backdrop of World War II. This added a more realistic tone to the book, and allowed the magic described in the comic book setting to become actualized.
The characters in this splendid work of fiction were also extremely well-developed. With rich histories and distinct personalities, the two main characters were especially enjoyable.
The most surprising detail of this book is that there was no need for previous comic book knowledge to enjoy it. I have never truly studied a comic book in my life, and I don't even read the comics in the newspaper, yet I felt that I had a total understand and visualization of what Chabon was describing. It was even exciting!
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay is suspenseful, enjoyable, and educational all at once, and it has become one of my favorite books.
I highly recommend it to both comic book aficionados and those who, like me, have no previous knowledge about them.
I found this book extremely poignant and full of wisdom, and believe that people with all types of backgrounds and beliefs can, too.
Rating: 
Summary: must be a guy thing
Review: I am finding this book boring, obscure, and irritating. I guess I don't really care about a couple overgrown boys who love comic books. I work with them everyday, though in modern times, it's video games that they like. To me a hero isn't someone who can leap tall building but, rather, someone who overcomes personal demons to become a stronger person who can care for other people. In other words, a female. :-)
I am finding this book especially disappointing because I liked Wonder Boys. I admit that I don't plan to put it down, even though I might skim some of the longer paragraphs and give up on looking up the annoyingly obscure words that I've never seen before. But I find it kind of irritating that it's good enough for me not to want to give up on it but not good enough for me to thoroughly it.
Rating: 
Summary: Mixed reaction
Review: An impressively vast story that fell a bit flat for me. It felt as though the book still needed cutting and fine-tuning and the long opening sentences and frequent use of large words made my attention stray. It was also very much a boy's book, with the few women in the story usually serving mothering or sex roles. Though it's definitely not among my favorites, the story of an unlikely team of comic book writers--a New York boy with low self-esteem and his Jewish cousin from Prague, escaping the Nazis, was unique, though at times, it felt stretched.
Rating:
Summary: Good, but boring.
Review: It was a good book, but I'm sad to say that it wasn't the best. The entire book was a grand masterpiece, but what a STRUGGLE it was to get through it! The boredom of this book is astronomical in human sense because the author doesn't seem to get to the point and prefers to stray away from the main story line. Sure, I enjoy him being descriptive of the surroundings and characters but he has overdone it. I was first considering to give this book 1 star, but considering the amount of work and effort Michael Chabon had put into this book, I have no choice to give it a 3. Give yourself a lot of time to read this book and to truly realize the fruits he has to offer.
Rating:
Summary: Wow!
Review: Sometimes, when life is too stressful, daydreaming becomes my favorite pasttime. The other day I was doing some mundane task, and I started to think of a scene of a movie that I had seen recently; only, when I started to think about what I was seeing in my thoughts, I realized that it was not a scene from a movie, but a scene from the very beginning of the book, when the young protagonist is still in Czechoslovakia. I've never had a book leave me with such vivid imagery and depth given to its characters. The intricacy of the plot is worth studying for any aspiring writer. It is a product of years of research by the author, a labor of love. I am in awe with this book. I only wish there was another in a series, like the comics Chabon writes of.
Rating:
Summary: Feat of Clay
Review: Confessing that you didn't luv this book is equivalent to pulling out a John Birch Society membership card in some circles-you get a lot of suspicious looks. But once again hype has outstripped ability in a literary fiction phenomenon. "Kavalier and Clay" practically drips flop sweat from every page-Chabon obviously put a lot of work and thought into it. But the characters remain flat on the page; his idea of complexity is to make one hero gay and the other commitmentphobic. And a Holocaust backstory will only get you so far in answering the big questions. How about first asking some big questions? This book depressed me with its modest ambitions and writing-workshop earnestness. Could television-watching be lopping off a dimension of the imaginations of young novelists? Will J.S. Foer save the day? Stay tuned
Rating:
Summary: Interesting though not superb.
Review: The book contained several memorable scenes including the description of the search for the Golem of Prague and Joe's escape from Prague inside its coffin; the boys' work on putting together their first comic books; and Joe's antarctic military service. In addition, the story does a good job at portraying how difficult it was to be gay in the 1940s and 1950s. I cannot give the book four or five stars (...)
Rating:
Summary: Good story, but is it really Pulitzer material?
Review: Intricate novel about two cousins, Josef Kavalier and Samuel Clayman, who corroborate on a comic book and find themselves at the peak of popularity in the years before WWII. Their character, "The Escapist," becomes iconic in the world of Superheros and the new but fast-growing comic book market. Enter Rosa Saks, who falls in love with Joe - and vice versa. But when the war starts, Joe, longing for his Jewish family and fearing the worst, enlists - and leaves Sam and Rosa to pick up the pieces left behind. Called an epic, this novel has a lot in it. The story sometimes seemed to stray far from the main theme, to me. The characters were interesting, but the book as a whole didn't entirely hold my interest nor draw me to it. Well written, but I can't see what made this one win a Pulitzer.
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