Rating: 
Summary: Recommended Read
Review: I had read glowing reviews of this book so, skeptically, I ordered it and read it in less than 24 hours as I was recovering from jet lag. The book did not disappoint from beginning to end. The story stayed strong, characters developed well and the story never gave in to an easy out. Usually books disappoint me in the end--it is like the author runs out of 'steam' but this powered through right to the end. I am only sorry I read it so fast and have nothing more about the characters to read.
Rating:
Summary: A Reason to Read
Review: I finished this book a few days ago and I'm still smiling. This is definately a book club book. This is my first time reading Spencer because I find in "matters of the heart" I prefer female writers. But I will look into some of his other novels. I loved the ending -but I wasn't ready for it. This is a great read. Don't ponder it too much, just enjoy it.
Rating:
Summary: Swept Away
Review: I lived in this book for three days, it was my home away from home. I got it because I've been reading over-the-top reviews of it. If anything the reviews didn't do the novel justice. A Ship Made of Paper has a great contemporary feel to it and it certainly is about the world we live in right now --except there's no war in the novel, thank God. But it also has all the pull and three dimensionality of the great 19th century novels, the kind where you cringe for the characters and can't stop reading because you have to know what happens next. And the basically parenthetical stuff about the OJ Simpson trial is perfect, as ironic and infuriating and revealing as the trial. itself.
Rating: 
Summary: Awful, just awful!
Review: A huge disappointment. A 12-year-old boy's outlook on sex (except some 12-year-old boys have a maturer attitude), and the race dialogue will make you wince and cringe. Besides, nobody actually talks like that. Flat dialogue, wooden characters, cutesy flashbacks...ugh...
Rating:
Summary: Brilliant.
Review: A shimmering, gorgeous novel. I actually left work early one day to finish it, nearly wept when it ended--it is, honestly, that good. It made up for all the lackluster books with heated cover blurbs that I've trudged through--that we've all trudged through. If publishers would published more work like this, they'd have a booming business going. A Ship Made of Paper will make you remember why you love to read.
Rating: 
Summary: A good read that could have been even better
Review: I enjoyed this book and found it compelling reading, something to get lost in for a couple of days. In several ways it is similar to John Updike's books "Couples" and "Marry Me", and fans of those books will probably enjoy this one. Spencer shares Updike's interest in the guilty pleasures of adultery, and also has the occasional striking image or turn of phrase in the Updike and Cheever tradition. However, compared to those two authors (my heros), Spencer is less polished. There are supporting characters whose roles seem to have been left on the cutting room floor: you think they'll eventually do something important, and they don't. There are a couple of glaring anachronisms that conflict with the setting of the story during the OJ trial. And when I went back to the beginning after finishing it, I was surprised to see a direct contradiction of fact about the children in the story. It didn't really matter, but it seems like sloppy writing and editing. Still, the exploration of the dynamics between two couples makes for an absorbing read.
Rating: 
Summary: Not a Love Story
Review: This is my first Spencer book and although I'm coming late to the hype, I just have to comment. I enjoyed this book if for no other reason than it kept me reading. I tried to be open-minded and constantly reminded myself that it was a work of fiction, however, as a black woman I couldn't help feeling at times like I got slapped. First, I was never convinced that Daniel was in love with Iris (this was not a love story). Second, there were so many stereotypes in this book I started to predict them before the passages appeared. And finally, black women are once again portrayed as empty, machine-like sexual beings. What could have been an outstanding love story was instead a typical account of what most people probably believe a relationship between a white man and black woman would amount to.
Rating: 
Summary: Disappointing
Review: I don't know when I have been more disappointed in a book. There is foreshadowing early on that the story will end badly, and indeed it does, on many levels. The story definitely draws you in, and while the author has a wonderful gift for prose and has bravely tackled sensitive issues, the result is an unbelievable, unhappy story with characters that are all foolish, weak, and selfish. Spencer portrays blacks very stereotypically and negatively, and it seems that he spent little time researching interracial couples.
The ending was an absolute disaster - how I wish I had stopped reading before I reached it.
Rating:
Summary: Going for simple happiness
Review: In A Ship Made of Paper, Scott Spencer outlines the lives of 2 very different couples who become intertwined in eachothers lives against all odds. Daniel Emerson is a lawyer who has recently moved back to his home town with his girlfriend Kate and her daughter Ruby. Although not in papers, they consider their relationship practically a marriage. Iris Davenport is a graduate student attending school in Daniel's home town. Iris is married to Hampton Welles, a wealthy, succesful investment banker, and they also have a son whos named Nelson. The akward part of the whole story is the fact that despite everything they have going for eachother in their lives, Daniel and Iris are madly in love with eachother and pursue an affair despite all the risks involved, and what makes it even more suprising is the fact that Daniel is white, and Iris is black. Scott Spencer writes from all four of the adults perspectives, but mainly sticks to Daniel and Iris' views on the affair they are undergoing. He does an excellent job at explaining the feelings that these two individuals have for eachother even through all the difficulties and hardships they face. The climax of the story is shocking, and the aftermath leaves you in wonder in how could these two people still survive the tragic events and continue their love for eachother, they are simply going for happiness, they enjoy eachother and want to be in eachothers' pressence. The end of the book leaves you open for much intepretation and makes you think for days after the book has been finished. Overall I think it's a great book and I'd recommend it to anyone into a little drama.
Rating:
Summary: I hated this book
Review: I'm a big fan of two previous Scott Spencer novels ("Endless Love" and "Waking the Dead"). But after reading a "A Ship Made of Paper," I wondered whether Spencer might be one of those writers who had a finite number of stories in him -- and we've already heard them all.
With his desire to speak out against racism in America, Spencer's heart is certainly in the right place, and it's too bad that more writers aren't of a like mind in that sense. Unfortunately, this novel functions more as an advertisement for adultery than it does for colorblindness. Neither Daniel nor Iris is trapped in a relationship that couldn't be gotten out of without, in Iris's case, a lawyer, or in Daniel's, a U-Haul. Yet instead of showing a bit of backbone, both Daniel and Iris, separately, before the central action of the book begins, decide to go looking for love behind their partners' backs. Only then do they develop a flirtation, start an affair, and Fall in Love. Then they have the gall to do things like, in Daniel's case, lie to his girlfriend Kate, carry on under her nose while living in her house as her suspicion rises, and research the practicalities of making a life with Iris while Kate sits at his side (I'm thinking of the scene where he queries a mixed couple about the practicalities of having an interracial marriage, while he's on what's supposed to be a romantic outing with Kate).
In an apparent effort to remove some of the sting of Daniel's actions, Spencer makes Kate an unappealing character herself -- she's racist, for one thing -- but do her flaws make it OK for Daniel to treat her in this manner? It seems to me that the answer is no; a good person would treat Kate with at least a minimal level of respect, regardless of her catalog of flaws. But Daniel is not of this mind. And it seems that Spencer, by making it easy to dislike Kate, is trying to take the easy way out, in a sense.
As for Daniel, Spencer has chosen to imbue his character with many of the traits he gave David Axelrod, the first-person narrator of "Endless Love." Yet while those characteristics (obsessiveness, among others) made sense in the older novel -- where the character in question was a teenager heartsick over the loss of his first love, and perhaps a bit crazy as well -- in Daniel, a middle-aged lawyer, these traits are charmless. They make Daniel seem like, well, an adolescent, when in fact he ought to be a grownup.
I won't get into the many implausible plot twists -- like the police officer who sends a volunteer search party out into treacherous terrain without flashlights, for instance, or Daniel's decision, while on his way to care for an invalid who despises him, to bring along two 5-year-olds, one of whom likes to beat the other up, even though the kids are supposed to be in day care anyway. Suffice to say there are plenty of unlikely scenes, and, yes, they're annoying.
Most offensive, though, is the author's suggestion that dishonesty is OK, as long as one has a worthy goal, like love, and especially if your love is interracial. A close second in the offensive category is the treatment of alcoholism, which, the text suggests, is a character flaw on a par with racism.
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