Rating: 
Summary: Dazzling......
Review: A Ship Made of Paper is a stunning account of love, passion and disaster. The story beautifully and harshly depicts the complexity of relationships. My heart raced at each intimate snapshot of Iris and Daniel the night of the October storm. Facinating details, harsh realities and somber outcomes. This is the real thing. Spencer reaches places in your heart other writers rarely have, and exposes it's tender underbelly that breaks so easily.The Tin Man once said "Now I know I have a heart, because it's breaking". A Ship Made of Paper makes you realize if you've never loved like this, then it's a waste of a heart. Brilliant.
Rating: 
Summary: dissapointing....
Review: After all the hype and praise I read about this book, I had high expectations. Generally speaking, Im a fan of Scott Spencer and have enjoyed his work immensly in the past. Its not that this is an awful book, so to speak, it has its merit and I made my way through it fairly quickly. The problem, I think, is that it never really connects with the audience...the characters are largely unlikable, unsympathetic, and unconvincing, and I never quite believed their all consuming "passion" for each other to the point that was needed to really get into the story. WHile I applaud Scott for addressing the issue of interracial romance, I agree that certain elements of the story and the characters felt uncomfortably like racism on the part of the author. I want to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that this wasnt his intention, but in particular his portrayal of black males struck me as stereotypical and racist. Not only is Iris's husband an angry, distant jerk, but more disturbingly, her preschool age son is described as an emerging sociopath, beating up and brandishing guns in the faces of his white playmates with no remorse. And Iris is a confusing and undefined character herself, its almost impossible for the audience to get a handle on her. Additionally, her sense of discomfort with her race bothered me in terms of what the author was getting at. IN all fairness, the white characters do not fair that much better: Daniel is wimpy, selfish and unlikable, for the most part, and Kate is a bitter, acid-tongued lush (except that unlike most characters written in this style, she doesnt even at least have the attribute of getting any truly funny wisecracks in). Mostly, the Greek tragedy-styled ending annoyed me......Spencer was able to pull off such events in his earlier (better) novels Endless Love and Waking the Dead, but it was convincing in those cases because both novels had a trippy, dream like feel that lent itself better to improbable events, and contained characters the audience could connect with and care about. In his defense, Spencer hasnt lost his tremendous gift with metaphors and language, or his unique ability to write an exhilerating yet not trashy sex scene, its just a shame he didnt have stronger base material to work with here.
Rating:
Summary: LITERATURE IS ALIVE AND WELL
Review: I just totally loved this novel. It is funny, sexy, and edge of the seat exciting. It's the kind of book you live in, get lost it, and wish were longer. Scott Spencer is my hero. What a stylist! And he knows things --what goes on between women and men, black people and whites, children and adults, and that people can do bad things and still be good people. Put this great great book in the time capsule and then one day 500 years from now people will know what it felt like to be alive in our time.
Rating: 
Summary: A Ship Made of Quicksand
Review: Like some of the other reviewers, I too felt I was duped into believing that this was a great book. I am not discrediting Spencer as a novelist, he's quite talented. It's not his writing style that is in question but this implausible plot with trifling characters that makes me take pause in praising this book. I like Spencer's attempt to show characters who are human, warts and all, we all have an evil side, but this book just rang so false. I don't think the author has done his homework whatsoever on interracial romance, or just black and white relations, period. Does the reader need to be bombarded with the race issue on just about every other page? It seemed that none of these characters could disengage from the race debate even for a second. The story didn't flow; it always seemed like poor social commentary. What was most disappointing were the black characters in the book, the Welles' family was portrayed as borderline pathological-the black males (father and son) embodied the stereotype of angry black male. The black woman character Iris is something out of a racist white male's fantasy of what a black woman should be. She was totally docile and suffered black self-hatred. I couldn't believe one scene in the book when Iris was confronted by another black female student who wanted to know why she wouldn't join in the black after school group. Iris went off on this young woman and accused her of being no different than a white racist. Poor Spencer! And Daniel, geez, the ultimate drip! Who cares what happened to him? I think him and Iris deserved each other and be miserable in each other's company. I don't believe they were in love, all they could think about was sex. Their relationship was based on borderline jungle fever. Cannot recommend. I'm so glad this didn't win the National Book Award.
Rating: 
Summary: Improbable
Review: OK, I'll admit that love stories aren't my favorite genre, and I got the book from the library only because it was an NBA nominee. Perhaps I got confused and basketball players, not book critics, made that nomination? I found the events improbable and the characters unlikeable and unbelievable. The end of the book was awful. Spencer seems to have tired of telling the story, so he abandoned everyone in the stinking mess that he had created, with their noses barely above the surface.
Rating:
Summary: PRIZE WINNER
Review: No doubt about it, this is the novel of the year. It was as if the book --the story, the characters, the writing --reached out, grabbed me, and pulled me right through until the end. It's true what they say --Spencer writes brilliantly about love, and about sex. But most of all he writes about intimacy. His characters are three dimensional, flesh and blood. It's been a long time since a novel has excited me as much as this one. It's a great novel by one of America's greatest writers.
Rating:
Summary: LOVE IS HELL--BUT HELL CAN BE LOVELY
Review: The reviewers keep on saying Scott Spencer is the master of the contemporary love story. But this novel is actually better than that. Spencer is the master of mixed emotions. Just as it is in life, love is a mixed blessing here. Exhilerating. Destructive. Innocent. Selfish. And sex is a great celebration of what is best in us, and often a terrible mistake, all at the same time. Though the writing is often feverish, there is so much reality in these pages that you feel as if you have lived the lives of his characters. Spencer just plain gets it. And his view of the racial divide is heartbreakingly true.
Rating: 
Summary: Well-done!
Review: I enjoyed this novel very much, I am not quite sure where i learned about its existence. I enjoyed his writing style and the foreshadowing that was used. It did not have an ending where everything gets resolved life doesn't work that way. I was pleasantly surprised on how the author was tuned into the african - american perspective in some ways. I even recommended this to my husband who has learned more from me than he will ever read. It definitely kept my attention.
Rating:
Summary: A STUNNER
Review: I'd give this book ten stars, if I could. Every page delivers excitement, insight, humor, or beauty --and sometimes you get all four. This book is pure pleasure. Watching these characters twist and turn, each of them caught in a web they have partly spun themselves and which has also partly been spun by society (or humanity, or history, or America, or whatever) is painful, but in a way that's stangely pleasurable. That's the oddest thing about this novel. You want to scream at the characters (sometimes), but you also want to take them home and live with them forever. I've read 38 (!) new novels this year --broke my leg in a fall -- and A SHIP MADE OF PAPER is far and away the greatest of the lot.
Rating:
Summary: A SHIP MADE OF PURE GOLD!!
Review: I've been waiting to read Spencer's book since I saw a few of the over-the-top reviews. To my amazement, the book is even better than the great reviews said it was. The writing is gorgeous. I copied out at least fifty great sentences to put in my trusty book of Great Sentences. Spencer is so easy to read it may not strike you at first what a great stylist he is. He makes it look so easy! I totally cared about these characters, I argued with them, I identified with them, I believed in them. This is a brave, smart, and often very funny book. And it's romantic without insulting the reader's intelligence. Sexy, too. Not many writers (especially men) know how to do that.
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