Rating: 
Summary: ditto to the reader from Miss.
Review: So my favorites are Thom Jones, Denis Johnson, George Saunders, Rick Bass, and the like. Someone said "Oh you should check out Moody". In a word, this book was slow. I found it hard to care about and the only thing that moved me was trying to see if more would be written about the guitarist's leather pants. It seemed like it was trying to do what Jesus' Son nailed to the wall- contempory non-beautiful people down to Earth honest to God in your face fictional realism. It didn't make it. I hesitate to read Ice Storm.
Rating:
Summary: ditto to the reader from Miss.
Review: So my favorites are Thom Jones, Denis Johnson, George Saunders, Rick Bass, and the like. Someone said "Oh you should check out Moody". In a word, this book was slow. I found it hard to care about and the only thing that moved me was trying to see if more would be written about the guitarist's leather pants. It seemed like it was trying to do what Jesus' Son nailed to the wall- contempory non-beautiful people down to Earth honest to God in your face fictional realism. It didn't make it. I hesitate to read Ice Storm.
Rating: 
Summary: This is New Jersey, alright
Review: The author writes well, indeed, but of a generation that may not be the reader's. At that point, the book becomes uninteresting. It seems that it took the characters in this book until 1990 to catch up with the 1960's. I don't believe that this book should have been re-issued; it is (out)dated.
Rating:
Summary: un-riveting
Review: The first thing that annoyed me about this book was that I kept having to reread sections to follow where Moody was going. I think the story would have been better at 1/3 the pages, but then I guess it couldn't have been packaged as a novel though. The characters were disagreeable to say the least, I really didn't care what happened to any of them, and the plot is pointless. But what really annoyed me the most was the way all these nonexistant locations kept popping up (the Garden State Thruway???), aren't there enough real places in Jersey interesting enough for this story? If you want to read a good story about working class New Jersey, do yourself a favor and pick up Tom Perottas "The Wishbones" instead.
Rating: 
Summary: Mixed Review
Review: This book was very interesting to say the least. At first it was hard to get into the beat of it. Rick Moody left many things in this book unexplained. A lot of times I was confused about who the action was happening to or exactly what was happening. It was a very depressing book. I don't think it had any real conclusion. The fact that it's called Garden State then it ends with three of the characters in New York City and one moving back home in the south was a bit out of place. It was never explained that Lane, when he tried to jump off the roof, what exactly happened, how he fell onto the fire escape, until quite later in the book. Why Lane was depressed to begin with wasn't explained or justified for any good reason. Moody probably just felt like there had to be one suicidal character. I think the book was better in the beginning when the characters were still holding onto their youth. Moody mentions a few dazzling ideas that shock and delight readers like the story of the anatomically correct dolls. That wasn't enough because near the middle of the book the interesting stories started dwindling and characters just had to reflect back to them all the time. It wasn't consistent to the end of the book. If moody could have kept up with the rate of little sub stories within this book to the end we would have a whole new better novel. None of the characters really change besides Mrs. Smail and Lane. They are not even the main characters in the novel. Lane is a secondary character forced into the main characters perspective. In fact I think that Moody only had a few characters in this book that he didn't treat like a main character. Which made it interesting but also took from the main story in a way. Alice, the main character, if she did change it was forced upon her. Something about Moody's writing that put me off a couple of times when I read it were his grammatical mistakes. More than once I saw the word an before a word that didn't begin with a. I did like this book, don't get me wrong. I just thought that it could have been better written. I liked how Moody had these passages that talked about strange things and described places. Anytime he did this I wondered where he was going then somehow every time he lead back to one of the characters doing something. In that way his writing is different from most peoples, who would have just started talking about what the character was doing right off the bat. The part I liked best in this book were the strange sub stories about the characters. I think it's worth reading just once. I should also mention that when I first saw this book I thought that it was the book based on the movie Garden State. After reading the back and one chapter I was horribly disappointed but I decided to continue with reading it.
Rating:
Summary: The Garden State:Beautiful scenery, but cold
Review: Upon picking up Rick Moody's Garden State,one might think it to be representative of the current trend of hip fiction: rife with drugs, sex, profane dialogue,and stark prose. As it happens it has all of these but the last; Moody's writing is dense and wordy, more so than the subject matter seems to merit. At times I had to read passages two or three times to understand what was going on- sticky metaphors are used in places where a more straightforward narrative might have been more elegant. Moody spins a trendily downbeat tale, with angstful and interchangeable twenty-somethings desperately spinning through prettily rendered New Jersey wastelands, going nowhere in particular. Characters drift in and out of the different plots- among them the saga of a floundering rock band and the homecoming of an unbalanced prodigal son- which always seem about to converge but never quite do. Three-quarters of the way through the book I was unsure where the book was going, and by the end I didn't care. Vivid imagery can only go so far: Rick Moody can write, but in Garden State he has written something I didn't care to read
Rating:
Summary: Blah,blah, blah, blah....
Review: What can I say about this novel? I thought it would be an interesting tale about disenchanted youths dealing with post-grunge depression. Instead, I was introduced to a handful of pitiful characters with no redeeming qualities whatsoever. I would rather read about people's "glory days" than about a bunch of hateful teenagers with nothing to look forward to. Honestly, I didn't finish this book. 50 pages was all I could take. So, I can't make any profound reviews of this book as I read nothing profound at all throughout the pages. You'd be better off renting the "Kurt and Courtney" documentary!
Rating:
Summary: Blah,blah, blah, blah....
Review: Written in a more traditional style than the Ice Storm, but with a slightly stronger storyline, and a little less uncomfortable in his depictions of his characters. The main character has just come back home from being in an instituation and is trying to get back into a normal step, while trying to straighten his life out. Unfortunately friends help him to not do so. Well written and smart, but also quite bleak. The Ice Storm was a natural progression for Moody and Purple America continues to build on the start of Moody's career. Read each of his novels and his short story collection.
Rating:
Summary: Isolated in Jersey
Review: Written in a more traditional style than the Ice Storm, but with a slightly stronger storyline, and a little less uncomfortable in his depictions of his characters. The main character has just come back home from being in an instituation and is trying to get back into a normal step, while trying to straighten his life out. Unfortunately friends help him to not do so. Well written and smart, but also quite bleak. The Ice Storm was a natural progression for Moody and Purple America continues to build on the start of Moody's career. Read each of his novels and his short story collection.
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