Rating: 
Summary: A little darker than the "News from Lake Wobegon"
Review: "Wobegon Boy" is darker than the News from Lake Wobegon is on the radio. The story ties up years and years of radio bits, although I think you would be fine if you've never listened to the show.Keillor's comments about marriage and fidelity in the book seem to be trying to explain his behavior in recent years. Overall a very good book.
Rating: 
Summary: I saw my friends, my family and myself in this gentle tale.
Review: A book which must be listened to, as read by the author, for the full effect. Garrison Keillor is, of course, an excellent storyteller, and the addition of his wonderful voice, HIS words in HIS voice, bring the title character vibrantly to life and make the book a total experience!
Rating:
Summary: Mr. Keillor, you understand Minnesotans
Review: Do you need a good laugh? As a Minnesotan, I read the first paragraph of this book and thought Mr. Keillor was writing about my family (the first paragraph discusses the attitude of good Lutheran mothers). I couldn't put this book down! I not only love Garrison Keillor's humor when it comes to all-things-Minnesotan, but I also love the way he makes me feel his characters are real people I know. I felt so sad when this book came to an end; I wanted to keep reading it forever. I think -- whether or not you're from Minnesota -- that's how you'll feel too, when you read this book.
Rating:
Summary: Like going home and hanging out with friends and family.
Review: Fans of Lake Wobegon have met these characters before. Now, in novel form, we get to spend a year or so with John Tollefson, Wobegon native who has gone to New York State to manage a radio station. The situations he gets himself into may or may not happen to others we know in "real" life", but we can relate. Keillor's narrative style, so popular from his years behind the "Prairie Home Companion" mike, comes through, and at times I could hear his voice in my head as I read. Some of his rambling narrative style is rough sailing for a reader, but the end result was always worth working through the sentences a second time.
Rating: 
Summary: Not up to Keillor standards
Review: For what it is, the book is not bad, in fact it is quite good. It is only in the light of Keillor's previous works that I give this a 3 star review. Unlike many of his previous works, this is a cohesive story centering on one character, not a melange of various people or a collection of stories. Thus, character development and plotting are much more important. These elements are successful, but I could not help feeling that something was missing. Perhaps I was expecting the book to be funnier. Perhaps I was expecting more quirky little Wobegon people to pop up and do strange things. Instead, this is the story primarily of the boy who left Wobegon and all his trials and loves that ensue. This is somewhat interesting, but it does not feel interesting enough. The feeling I get is that once a Wobegonian is removed from the pack, they become - well - boring. I wonder if the main character's life is really interesting enough to fill a book.
Rating:
Summary: Garrison's magic does not extend to a full-length novel
Review: Garrison Keillor is known as a great writer and teller of short, pithy stories. They're based mostly on times and places from his Lutheran, Minnesota origins, but they succeed because they use characters we can all recognize, and often sympathize. The trouble with this book is how it tries to apply the same formula to a novel-length story...it gets very strained. I'm no writer, but it seems the key to a novelist's success is integrating many scenes and themes into a coherent whole. A character-driven novel, where the action is secondary in the story, faces a special challenge in this department. The people must all push the plot forward in an identifiable way, and that does not happen here.
My wife and I have both read and loved Keillor's short stories. I gave this to her as a gift; she gave up 1/3 the way through, handed it to me, and I did the same thing. It was a great disappointment, but not too surprising in retrospect, given Garrrison is short-story teller. He is a modern classic, but that does not mean he'll always succeed. Even the great Mark Twain brought subtle elements of suspense into The Adventures of Huck Finn, early on. If Garrison Keillor tries another novel, he needs a more compelling story to bring his characters to life.
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Summary: Thanks, Garrison!
Review: Garrison Keillor, who hails from my neck of the woods, has done a fine job of Wobegoning in WOBEGON BOY. I laughed so hard while trying to read the Trojan Duck Blind section aloud to my husband that I didn't believe he got all the jokes. I had to read it to him again. Anyway, just had to say, Thanks, Garrison. Love your books. Can't listen to your radio program.
Rating:
Summary: A terrific read, as always
Review: Garrison Keilor is the modern master of the narrative digression, musing on life and what is does to people. The person most being done to here is forty-three-year-old John Tollefson, refugee from Lake Wobegon, Minnesota, running an NPR station in a college town in upstate New York. He's an intelligent, quiet, reflective guy, trying to be a Happy Lutheran even though he has dark opinions about talk radio. He falls in love with Alida, a history professor at Columbia, and they see each other one weekend a month, which maybe is preferable to marriage. He has an idea for a "garden restaurant," which ends up a money pit, thanks to the mismanagement of his lawyer, Alida's brother, and the chicanery of an ex-hippie contractor. But, as in most of Keillor's writing, the plot is the least part of the book. The best part is always the telling of tales about family and friends by everyone in the little town, the spinning of yarns about ancestors, the sometimes dark but generally tolerant and amused interweavings of personalities at the Chatterbox Cafe and the Sidetrack Tap. The author himself, of course, is in many ways very much like the characters he portrays, relating the adventures of John's great-uncle, the snake-oil medicine man who served four terms in Congress, and his Aunt Mildred, who flim-flammed the bank where she was a teller and decamped to Buenos Aires, and his own adolescent adventures tipping privies and trying to pick up girls at the roller rink. The set piece is John's coming home for his father's funeral, the gathering of the clan, the service itself, led by his pastor brother-in-law, and the drunken wake at the Sidetrack afterward. As we discover, there are just as many oddballs per family in Lake Wobegon as anywhere else, probably more, and Keillor paints them vividly in more than three dimensions. This is the sort of book that could never be made into a film, but which you will drive your spouse crazy reading aloud passages from.
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Summary: Hands Down, This is Garrison Keillor¿s best novel
Review: Hands Down, This is Garrison Keillor's best novel. A book about the power of love, the dread of family, and the hope we all have to be better. Keillor reintroduces us with some of the characters of his last book" Lake Wobegon Days, and takes their struggles even further. Our hero John goes on a journey of self-discovery with the funnies of predicaments, and ends up in a much better place in the end. Read this book, it's really a true piece of work from a great master storyteller.
Rating:
Summary: A "Prairie Home Companion" in print...
Review: Hey, I love Garrison Keillor! The book was cute, witty, and sharply written. Keillor has a way with words, so much so that we feel pity and alliance with our "Wobegon Boy" from the start. If you have wanted to take a retaliatory stab at Political Correctness, make fun of your parents, and tell off your boss, read this book. You can do all, at least viscerally, through Keillor.
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