Rating: 
Summary: So beautiful but also so dark
Review: Cunningham is so good at pinpointing emotions. When he describes a feeling you know what he's talking about. There were some incredible lines here. Except for Ben, whose habits were inexplicably weird, I understood the characters and their wretched lives. I write "wretched" because I think that is the main problem with this book. Cunningham spans three generations and its just chapter after chapter of misery. Life has its ups and downs. Where's the hope in these people's lives? I want to see Constantine wake up one morning and for no reason at all feel good about himself, because in life that happens. But nonetheless, I would recommend this book to anyone . Cunningham is a writer.
Rating: 
Summary: Brilliant, Wonderful writing
Review: Flesh and Blood stays with you. The characters are haunting, and Michael Cunningham's way with words is exceptional. Billy(Will) is an incredible portrait of a person's recognition of his own sexuality. The tone of this novel is brilliant. Michael Cunningham has a shocking effect and a beautiful way of presenting his view points...Would recommend to those who love high literature...also The Hours is an incredible fete...Congratulations Michael Cunningham, you are truyly brilliant!
Rating:
Summary: An Insightful and Redemptive Read
Review: Great use of language and a very insightful look into a family fraught with dysfunction. Not for everyone, certainly, but the characters are sympathetic and the scope of the book is ambitious, covering 50 years and a dozen principle characters, with points of view switching throughout.
Rating:
Summary: An absolutely sensational melodrama
Review: Having read this one several years ago, I was looking forward to coming back and rediscovering it, and I certainly wasn't disappointed. This is an absolutely gorgeously written novel, full of many, many insights into the human condition. Sex, family ties, loyalty, the immigrant experience, HIV/AIDS, generational differences, is all beautifully portrayed in Cunningham's beautiful portrait of American life. He has exploded the American dream in this gritty saga of the Stassos family, founded by Constantine, an ambitious Greek immigrant, and his Italian wife Mary. As Constantine ruthlessly pursues his fortune, his three children are caught between his fierce demands for family loyalty and his volatile temper, and what a temper it is!This book is just so rich in vivid details of family life, and so masterfully crafted with a narrative voice of great emotional power and intensity. The words just ebb and flow, as they role off the page, and you just have to keep reading as each particular drama unfolds. I especially liked the characterization of Will, as he grows and matures and gradually comes out in gay life, and his strained and tenuous relationship with his father is portrayed so genuinely and vividly. In fact, all the characters, are just SO multi-faceted and multi-dimensional. Cunningham has a true gift for character and expressing the intricate nuances of everyday life. A great work of literature from a fine writer. Michael
Rating: 
Summary: Awful
Review: Heavy-handed melodrama, characters on puppet strings, wave after wave of tragic plot nonsense. Awful.
Rating: 
Summary: Yawn
Review: I had the sense, laboring through this largely uninspired effort from Mr. Cunningham, of watching a dispirited mason slowly piece together a brick wall. There is a mechanical feel to the novel, a definitive lack of whimsy, of anything even remotely resembling joy. The absence of any definitive plot line would be forgivable if the prose were more exuberant, but Cunningham's language (contrary to many of the raves on the book jacket) is stagnant, often graceless. Linguistic playfulness can, to a certain degree, sustain dull characters or an ordinary storyline. But we're not that lucky here. He gets you from A to B, but for all the tribulations endured by his characters (physical abuse, divorce, sexual awakening, infidelity) the ride is rather dull.
Rating:
Summary: buy this book now.
Review: I lingered over the last 100 pages of this novel, both dreading and longing for the ending. The novel will never leave you. Cunningham's real characters will burrow into your heart and mind and haunt you for weeks. Buy this book now, clear your schedule and get started.
Rating:
Summary: One family, many sorrows
Review: I really don't have anything new to add, since the other reviewers have done that for me, but here I am, anyway. I personally enjoyed this book, and at times, I was upset by the choices some characters in this book made. I was yelling: "How could you do that? I hate you!" But that passed, and soon I saw (or at least tried to see) why they would do such things. This is when I realized how good this book really is. I was being angry at fictional characters! This showed me that the author had well-developed characters and a story that kept the reader interested. (Which wasn't a surprise, since I read his other two books.) Recommended if you get lost in chacarcter-driven novels about the struggles of life. -Ater
Rating:
Summary: So Good I Wrote a Review!
Review: I was deeply moved by Cunningham's chronicle of a family which became more real to me than my own. Each character, even relatively minor ones, are painted so well that I wonder at the size of the author's canvas. Truly, this a work of uncommon depth and breadth for such a young author. Even the death of one of the characters is told with such first person transparency that had to check my pulse when I was done. As plain as your own back yard, yet as stunning as the Grand Canyon, Cunningham slowly reveals the remarkable treasure of family life and interconnected relationships which we all know but somehow fail to regard.
Rating:
Summary: One Word: Research!
Review: I was one of the who put this book down in disgust... Why? Because when one of the characters visits his parents in Phoenix, he finds it dusty and flat, and the streets littered with dead, squashed armadillos (!) Ummmmm.... Where to begin? We have no armadillos here in Phoenix. We are also famed for numerous ranges of small, craggy mountains breaking up the cityscape. (Camelback Mountain is quite well-known -- maybe word has even reached NYC? Or Squaw Peak -- recently renamed for a soldier killed in Iraq to Piestewa Peak? ) Hard to miss, really. I climb them and bike through them a lot, and see them from my home every day. Mr. Cunningham is obviously the sort of Eastern a--hole elitist who thinks all "Square States" are interchangeable. Well, they are not. And one can reasonably expect an author to write about what they know (barring fantasies, but even there aesthetics apply). Mr. Cunningham apparently does not know even one person from Phoenix, or know someone who does. Nor does he seem at all acquainted with elementary research: a trip to the library would have sufficed. (I think the internet was not up to snuff yet when he wrote this, so I won't throw Google in his face.) Mr. Cunningham, I am an Arizona native. The only armadillos I have seen were in junk stores, made into '50s purses. Other than that, I think Arizona last saw armadillos in the most recent Ice Age, and they were enormous things called Glyptodonts -- and not prone to squashing by cars either, due to their elephantine size, and their obvious unavailability due to being long-extinct. Sorry. This may seem a minor quibble, but it was enough for an Arizonan to put the novel down. What I read was excellent, up to the part with the crazy mix-up between Tulsa and Phoenix.
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