Rating: 
Summary: Funny, Profound, Tender and a Knock-Out
Review: I loved A Girl Named Zippy, but Solace is an achievement beyond that, a beautiful novel that fearlessly tackles the many faces of love, plus ventures a few things about the very nature of God, with an authorial voice that displays, with an enviable ease, a sureness about certain profound subjects and a simultaneous humble declaration of complete ignorance, coming, perhaps, to the conclusion that it is a combination of both that is the mechanism by which human beings manage to find the strength to get up in the morning. All that, and it's funny, too. I can't stop thinking about it, and I want everyone I know to read it.
Rating:
Summary: Hard to start, then hard to put down
Review: I loved this book. The thought process and the broken protagonists of this book make you feel like you're not the only one with doubts and shortcomings. I love the detail of the characters, and the originality of the plot.
Rating:
Summary: Hard to start, then hard to put down
Review: I loved this book. The thought process and the broken protagonists of this book make you feel like you're not the only one with doubts and shortcomings. I love the detail of the characters, and the originality of the plot.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent Book! Unique, Compelling, I Highly Recommend This!
Review: I read this book six weeks ago, and am still thinking about the ideas, characters, and situations in Haven Kimmel's fabulous book!! I just could NOT put this book down...the characters and situations are so unique, so believable, and the description of small town life is so utterly accurate that I felt the "small town-ness"."The Solace of Leaving Early" struck many familiar chords in me. I enjoyed the book immensely, and it also made me think about many ideas and situations! Anxiously awaiting the next book, and going for her first book, "A Girl Named Skippy".
Rating:
Summary: Breathtaking
Review: I saw the author read from her book at my local B&N and I was so impressed -I've never heard an author read so beautifully- that I bought her book. I took it home and finished it last night at 4 in the morning and I had to write a review because this is an absolutely beautiful book filled with richness, texture, people I love and wisdom. What is Wisdom? It is something somebody says that just cuts clean through you to your core, that rings of the truth so loud, that makes you gasp at the beauty. I adore this book and will read whatever Ms. Kimmel writes next.
Rating:
Summary: Great character study
Review: I was interested in all of the characters in this book, as quirky as they all were. The author did a great job of exploring each individual's feelings and experiences, enabling the reader to really get to know and understand each of them. The storyline was put together cleverly as well, carefully unraveling answers to the reader's questions as the book progressed. I enjoyed the ending, and thought the epilogue was really a bonus (more discoveries!).
Rating: 
Summary: Unlikely in the extreme
Review: I've never submitted a review before, and what moves me to do so today is the fact that I find myself bewildered as to the accolades and recommendations that this book has accrued. Above all, I've never found myself so at odds with Publisher's Weekly and Library Journal. But this book simply exasperated me with its abstruse philosophical musings set forth as casual dialogue between characters, and its awkward and self-conscious plot structure. Englightenment came when I read the acknowledgments and learned that the author's godmother, upon hearing Kimmel bemoan the fact that she would never write a doctoral dissertation on Alfred North Whitehead and the nature of grief, advised, "You could always write it as a novel." That is clearly what happened, and the result is an extremely ponderous piece of pedantry disguised as a novel. Another woeful shortcoming is the laughably unrealistic dialogue the protagonist directs toward the 6 and 8-year girls in the story. An example:
"And then I went back to schoo,l, and I tried, I did, I thought-well, I knew that there were far worse things than losing a lover, and so I just avoided him assiduously, I studied for my prelims and assembled a dissertation committee and completed my proposal, and then I showed up for my orals and he was sitting there with [his new wife.] He was give me this paternal look-paternal, Immaculata? fatherly? like a priest?-and I could see that he was trying to say something to me, something about how he'd found me and saved me, he had, in some measure, made me what I was, and he had come because he was proud of me." Even assuming a level of precociousness on the part of Immaculata, which the author has not specified, would any 8 year old be able to parse that passage?? I read this book because my book group will review it next month; its occupancy on my bookshelf will end with an eviction notice the next day.
Rating:
Summary: A Great Beach Read
Review: In "The Solace of Leaving Early," Kimmel evokes the complex beauty and insular quality of small town life. Langston Braverman, a soul-weary graduate student, returns to her Indiana hometown to nurse herself with copious draughts of self-pity and solitude, but an inconvenient and messy salvation awaits her in the plight of Illuminata and Epiphany--two eccentric and tragically touched sisters.
Humorous as well as thoughtful, this book helps dispel the stereotype of the Midwest as a haven for rednecks and hayseeds. Kimmel's book is peopled with the odd, the lovely, and the holy. Take this one to the beach, and find yourself wandering the leaf-dappled streets of Haddington, Indiana.
Rating: 
Summary: A flawed gem
Review: It is a tribute to Haven Kimmel's strengths as a writer that this is a good book despite its flaws. Her story draws together a troubled small-town pastor, a depressed young woman, and two traumatized children. In other hands this could have been very grim, but Kimmel has a light touch, a quirky sense of humor, and great love for all her characters. She has a poet's eye for the perfect phrase and the perfect moment to stop. Langston and Townsend are complex and believable, not always likeable, but always intelligent. As to the flaws, readers of "A Girl Named Zippy" will be surprised to find out that the young girl who refused to believe in God has grown up to find, not just religion, but esoteric and erudite theology. We are expected to believe that an entire small-town family and the town's pastor share a deep interest in Kierkegaard, Nietzche, and St. Thomas Aquinas. It's possible, but reads like a projection of the author's interests. While many great novels have dealt with religious doubts and searching, constant references to theologians are best left out. The ending of the book is pleasing and beautifully told (Langston's loving speech to the children going off to school is priceless), but not believable. While we have seen some signs of the pastor's changing feelings toward Langston, we are unprepared for her about face. In spite of these flaws, the book is a beautiful rendition of people awakening from pain to find themselves woven firmly into each others lives.
Rating:
Summary: Kimmel's debut novel is a disaster: boring, arcane, trite
Review: It is hard to believe that an author who wrote the inspiring, witty and delightful "A Gril Named Zippy" could offer a debut novel so dreadfully dull and convoluted that the title ironically provides a solution to disappointed readers. The only solace in Haven Kimmel's "The Solace of Leaving Early" is exactly that: leave early. This incredibly bad novel is dense and turgid; her protagonists are so grating and stilted that they'd make native Indiana residents embarrassed to claim residence in the Hoosier state. Lost amidst ponderous theological, philosophical or existential ruminations is a plot so predictable that many readers will abandon the novel halfway through and not miss a thing. "The Solace of Leaving Early" will appeal, however, to a select group of people. If you enjoy pretentious, arcane and esoteric allusions to literature and theology, Kimmel's writing will thrill you. It will come as no surprise to discover that the author majored in English and attended seminary; her novel literally advertises her erudition. For those readers who savor sexually-frustrated female protagonists who sequester themselves in a suffocating attic in the middle of summer as an act of self-isolation or flagellation while pretending to write the great American novel, Langston Braverman will fulfill every fantasy. Readers who prefer the quietly isolated and oh-so observant-yet-tormented man of God, Reverend Townsend's sophomoric pronouncements and anguished ambivalence over the direction of his life will satisfy your tastes. Devotees of extraordinary, inexplicable religious phenomena will thrill at the appearance of the Virgin Mary in a tree trunk, discovered by two sisters whose parents perished in a macabre domestic dispute. Haven Kimmel proved in her memoir that she possesses compassion, humor and insight. Her soaring account of the joys, possibilities and hidden delights of small-town Indiana life reveals an author who surely has an informed heart. Her debut novel is simply astonishing in its divergence from her talent. As a memoirist, Kimmel honors language; she is nuanced, honest and understandable. As a novelist, she is pedantic, pretentious and unintelligible. The people who populate "Zippy" are genuine; even their flaws make them lovable. The characters in "Solace" are as endearing as fingernails being scratched down a chalkboard; to a person they are predicatble and strangely disaffecting. Haven Kimmel should have abandoned "The Solace of Leaving Early" quietly and unobtrusively in her own attic.
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