Rating: 
Summary: Wow!
Review: I was about 1/2 way through "White Teeth" when I read some of the reviews posted here, and I thought, "Did they read the same book I am enjoying so much?" I approached the ending with trepedation, wondering if I would be disappointed, as I was with the ending of "Corelli's Mandolin," so good for the first 3/4, and then with such an abrupt ending. But no! The ending was perfect, all strands tied up, and all in character. I highly recommend this marvelous tour de force to any readers with a sense of humor and of history. To Zadie Smith, "You go, girl!" Can't wait to see what you come up with next.
Rating:
Summary: Grrreat Read!
Review: Great characters and wonderful prose make it a must read.
Rating: 
Summary: I wish I could finish
Review: It's not like me not to finish a book... and the truth is I probably will, but I've been stuck mid way thru for over a week now and frankly I have no desire to pick it up again.
Rating: 
Summary: A great 300-page book...
Review: ...unfortunately, it's 448 pages (paperback edition) long.Lots of fine stuff in here. Zadie Smith obviously has great writing chops. However, something odd occurred in the editing process. Ummm, namely, the process just didn't happen. The book has the feel of something that passed directly from Zadie's word processor to my hands. There are entire chunks of the book, especially in the last 150 pages, that are developed and just never amount to a hill of beans. An animal-rights protest group thingie (can't think of what else to call it) is particularly maddening. You could literally excise the whole piece - probably 40 - 50 pages worth of fluff - and the book would read exactly the same. White Teeth is at its best when it focuses on its core characters of Archie Jones and Samed Iqbal. Around half-way through, Ms. Smith appears to get bored with those two. Unfortunately for her readers, the novel loses its focus as soon as Samed and Archie fade to the background. For the last 200 pages, they are presented as mere afterthoughts. To the author's credit, the book is notable for its very impressive range of scholarship on geographies as varied as Jamaica, Bangladesh, North London, and Bulgaria; in addition, topics like Muslims, Jehovah's Witnesses, genetics, World War II and teenage angst are covered with uncommon skill. This is no hack writer. So despite my criticisms here, I look forward to Zadie Smith's next effort.
Rating: 
Summary: A very good book
Review: I belive that it got a bit too much hype, but it was very good, I reccomend it if you like these kinds of books.
Rating:
Summary: Hilarious & Powerful
Review: I heard about White Teeth while reading a review of The Feast of Love(which the reviewer did not like). So thank you. I loved them both. I picked up some more future books from reviews on White Teeth. So much for the benefits of reading 142 Amazon.com reviews. I gave this book a 5 star rating because it was a pure joy and I want to help get the overall rating to 4 stars. White Teeth is one of the best contemporary novels I have read. I enjoyed it the same way I enjoy Tom Robbins. I am learning while I am laughing. The various characters stick with you even if they do fade in the text. I thoroughly enjoyed the biting irony.It's too bad that so many readers were put off by their expectations. I am also anxious for Zadie Smiths' next book.
Rating:
Summary: I loved the Neena Character
Review: This book has an enourmous amount of potential and the end is a little abrupt, but overall it does a great job entertaining and showing little tid-bits of cultural positioning in England. The characters are fun, maybe a little more could be done with the females and their social make ups. Looking forward to her next,
Rating:
Summary: Aims high, falls low
Review: It's tough to write a plausible novel in you mid-twenties. You've had limited life experience. Even worse, you don't yet realize that. If you're wise, you stick to your personal sphere and come out with something like disguised autobiography, and many authors have found success following that formula. Stray from it at your peril because if you're brilliant, you'll end up with Pickwick Papers. But if you're ordinary you'll produce something like White Teeth. This is another in that depressing line of books written by someone who's looked at life mainly through a TV set. Characters ape their on-screen representations instead of the other way around and are consequently believable only to those for whom life mimics pulp fiction. The story hops around in a vain attempt at drama and creativity. There are excellent books up for literary awards in the UK this year and some fine first novels (try Azzopardi's The Hiding Place). How White Teeth finds its way into their company escapes me.
Rating:
Summary: Stripping the Flesh From Life
Review: While reading this book, I had a dream that tells me all I need to know about Zadie Smith's "philosophy" in this vastly over praised diatribe against a meaningful life. The dream: on the deck of a ship is a living whale which is having its flesh carved from its body with sharp knives as it looks on with infinitely sad eyes. Zadie Smith uses her sharp tongue to eviscerate life. All the characters in this book are the absolute worst of collective fools and despisers of life who haven't the self reflection or will to make the least little attempt to drag themselves from the cesspools from which they came. I wouldn't spend five minutes with any of these characters for fear of being tainted by their lunacy, lack of spirit and outright hatred of life. Take Archie a cipher who slouches through life pathetically flipping a coin to make decisions for him, he would even kill himself based on this chance event. And when "life"--in the form a deranged butcher who starts each day making a mad attempt at hacking live pigeons to death with a sharp cleaver-offers Archie a second chance his first act is to drive around until he finds a commune in which he can get drunk and laid-what magnificent philosophical insight. Archie's sole "contribution" to the world is saving the life of a Nazi eugenicist-and so it goes throughout this book. Then there is Clara, future wife of Archie, whose mother is a Jehovah's Witness waiting for the second coming mostly in anticipation of seeing everyone, save the blessed 144,000 left standing at the world's end, having their "eyes melt in thier sockets" and being burned alive thereby giving justification of her clear and obsessive hatred of life. Clara just flips to some equally ridiculous opposite of this "religion" by becoming a drug taking slut - fine everybody needs to experience the different sides of themselves but no one in this book, and I mean no one, ever learns a thing from their experiences and grows from them; they are absolutely bound by their past with no hope or even reason to bother with making their future different. I could go on and on about Smith's utterly offensive take on life as expressed through the characters of this novel. But a summary will do. All men, particularly fathers, are either fanatical, self delusional, masturbatory fools or flaccid, passive nothings. Women, who are no better, all make pathetic choices or allow choices to be made for them and then stay with them as if this were emblematic of love--but love of what?. Their children either become their soulless, spiritless parents or their equally execrable fanatical or flaccid opposites. Smith refers to Yeat's poem The Second Coming which speaks to the coming of the Spiritus Mundi where "somewhere in the sands of the desert/A shape with lion body and head of a man,/A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,/Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it/Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds." But she invites the reader to mock this beast all the while beckoning it along. This book is not funny, it is not wise and it is not a pleasure to read unless of course it makes you feel better, like Hortense (Clara's mother) to imagine life eviscerated before your very eyes. Smith wraps all this "philosophy" in fancy, glittering gibberish but it doesn't cover over the stink of her sense of the world. Everyone has white teeth, however Smith's, like Clara's have simply been knocked out leaving only a razor sharp tongue stripping the flesh from life.
Rating: 
Summary: Strong start, woeful end
Review: I wanted to give this book more than 2 stars--the writing is truly inspired--but the story itself fissled a good 100+ pages from the end. I worked hard to get through over 400 pages, and in no way felt rewarded by the end. Instead, disappointed. Too many characters of little or no sigficance bog down and are flat, and lead the reader astray. A little more editing would have made it tons more agreeable. Still, a remarkable undertaking for a first-time novelist
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