Rating: 
Summary: Highly recommended
Review: I bought this book originally because I enjoy comic book history and it's clear after reading this that Michael Chabon does too (and he must be a huge Jack Kirby fan). Although I loved the book, there is some truth (as expressed by one or two other people) that the story 'takes a while to get going'. My complaint is that Chabon seems to get carried away with his whimsical narrative: some of the sentences are so long and feature so many digressions that by the time you've got to the end of the sentence you've almost forgotten what the point was!. In other words, he's sacrificing 'the story' in order to exercise his literary skills. The result is a lot of 'cozy sentences' that don't do a lot to move the story forward atleast in the first half of the book. For this reason, it takes (in my opinion) a good 100 pages to really get into the book. The real strength lies in the characters who you can almost smell - surely they exist! How can you not love Joe?!
I also found the events after the war to be a bit 'unbelievable' however it's clear he's done his research.A tremendous book nevertheless.
Rating:
Summary: It doesn't get any better than this
Review: Epic, gorgeously written, rapturously in love with language (without being in love with the sound of its own voice), and an astonishingly insightful look at the pop culture and popular mind-set of mid-20th-century America. I wouldn't shorten it by a single syllable. This is indeed a (if not the) Great American Novel.
Rating: 
Summary: Amazingly tedious at times
Review: I found this book hard to read. I liked the characters, the setting, and the plot. However, more than once I felt like I was reading someone's master's thesis on superaction comic book heros in American culture which told me much more than I needed to know to move the story along. The lengthly context-setting descriptions interrupted the flow of the plot, character development, and dialogue. Large portions of this book read more like a reference work than a novel. I hope they make a movie out of this as the visual medium would instantly communicate the context that took pages to describe in text.
Rating:
Summary: Great American Novel
Review: I loved this book for many of the same reasons I loved "Great American Novel" by Roth. Both offer very entertaining yet piercing looks into american culture. I noticed that there is one reviewer who panned this book because it was not an in-depth enough forray into the history of the comic book industry. That's like saying "Slaughterhouse Five" is a lousy novel because of its merely cursory treatment of the Dresden meat-packing industry. Of course, the same reviwer also had raves for a non-fiction book about alien abductions. So, I guess if you're hard-core into comic books and the mysterious truth behind alien abductions, you are at risk for entirely missing the point of this novel. I am amazed at the way this book can be so entertaining and fun to read, and at the same time so compelling and thought-provoking.
Rating:
Summary: artists working in time
Review: Two artists, the one a gifted writer, the other a consummate draftsman and magician, live, love, and suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune during the WWII and post era.It's a gorgeous novel. At 750+ pages it's hard for me to recommend to many of my friends. But that does not detract from the novel's qualities.
Rating:
Summary: nothing short of profoundly amazing!
Review: i absolutely loved this book. i suppose the only criticism i have of it is it wasn't a page-turner (usually). but i suppose thats the case with chabon's books, because i had this problem reading wonder boys as well. but if you can stick with it with this long novel, its so worth it! the prose is magical and poetic; his writing is crisp and eloquent and epic; the characters are so alive and well drawn. i found myself in tears at the end, and yet completely satisfied. chabon is my personal favorite modern writer. this is his best book yet.
Rating:
Summary: This book ROCKS!
Review: This book is so engrossing that I missed my stop on several occassions while reading it during my daily commute on public transportation. I didn't mind though. It gave me more time to read!
Rating:
Summary: sprawling, meandering masterpiece
Review: The first sign of a great book, I've always believed, is the ability of the author to tightwalk that thin line between the pulps--grandiose and convoluted plots with great entertainment value but with the lack of sobriety found in art--and gravity. In Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, the author manages to walk this line deftly. It is rare to find a book as entertaining as this one. Everytime you sense a calm moment, the book jumps off into another surprising plot twist that leaves you wanting to read more. But, of course, that is not what makes it a great book. That lies it's wonderful themes and great, likeable characters. No passage I found presents the amalagamation of theme and character than this passage from the book by one our heroes, Joe Kavalier when he is alone near the end of the book: "It was the expression of yearning that a few magic words and an artful hand might produce something -- one poor, dumb, powerful thing -- exempt from the crushing strictures, from the ills, cruelties, and inevitable failures of the greater Creation. It was the voicing of a vain wish, when you got down to it, to escape. To slip, like the Escapist, free of the entangling chain of reality and the straitjacket of physical laws ... The newspaper articles that Joe had read about the upcoming Senate investigations into comic books had always cited "escapism" among the litany of injurious consequences of their reading, and dwelled on the pernicious effect, on young minds, of satisfying the desire to escape. As if there could be any more noble or necessary service in life." The writing, although sometimes ostentatious, (expect to get your dictionary out a lot) is mostly superb. Chabon at his best seems to me like a great mix reverie and reality. His accounts of Joe and his family especially Thomas, and later passages of the older Sam Clay and Joe I found especially moving and well written. His accounts of New York City of the 30's and 40's are almost perfect, like we the reader are there ourselves. But there is the added bonus of having the comic book superheros created in the novel come to life. His writing of "The Escapist" and "Luna Moth" origins were like reading comic books without the pictures, just pure fun. By the end of the novel, the emotional investment I had into the lives of Joe and Sam, although it had snuck up on me, was prodigious, as I found myself with a feeling of pathos for everything the young Kavalier and Clay wanted to be and how they had ended up--that huge gap I've certainly felt from what I had expected life to be when I was young and the normality and ennui which most of us ending living with. As a result by the ending, what is one of the most entertaining reads of this new century suddenly turns into a beautiful, perfect book.
Rating: 
Summary: A decent read
Review: I'm not a big fan of what I consider "literature", which is that seperate area where authors like Chabon are pigeon holed, but I heard a good review of this on a TV show, so I picked it up. This book moves along in most places and keeps you interested in whats going on. There are some big words that I didn't understand, but that didn't hinder me understanding that scene. If you like reading about comic books, world war 2 and don't mind expanding your mind a bit, this is a good book for you to read.
Rating:
Summary: Sad, but interesting story
Review: I read this after a friend recommended it. I wasn't really sure what to expect, but I was pleasantly surprised. The story is long and takes quite a few unexpected turns, but the characers are very interesting and I was really rooting for them to do well. This wasn't a "page-turner" that I just had to keep reading to find out what happened next, so it went a little slow, but it was definitely worth it. The authoris a little hard to follow at times, often leaving in the middle of a scene and telling some back story in its entirety only to return right where he left off. But it all comes together pretty well despite that, you just have to pay attention. I also thought the ending was somewhat predictable, but I think the author kind of wrote himself into a corner, where there weren't many choices about how the story could end. But despite that, he handled it pretty well and it was as good an ending as the story would allow. I would recommend this book for it's great characters and interesting story, but be prepared, because there are quite a few sad parts to it.
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