Rating:  Summary: Absolutely riveting Review: I picked this book up totally by accident based on the title "Girlfriend in a Coma" - it was the name of a favourite song. Once I started to read, I couldn't stop. What if this really happened? What would I do? The mind boggles. Over the course of a day I read and read until my eyes hurt... This book is totally amazing and even though I found the ending slightly whimsical - let's just say - YOU NEVER KNOW -- Totally amazing book-do yourself a favour and have a look!
Rating:  Summary: captivating Review: Have you ever wondered what it would be like if you could be here when the world ended? Have you wondered how it could ever happen? Have you ever loved someone so much that you would wait your entire life to have them...and once you get them, find out that you might loose them? Well, I have. I picked this book up purely on Coupland's reputation, and the fact that I've read virtually all of his titles to date. I was astounded, and still am, of his gift for detail, and flair. His ability to capture the feeling of the moment, and in a way that doesn't make you feel like you're reading a history assignment. I read the book cover-to-cover in alittle under 36 hours, with frequent breaks. I put the book down with a feeling of...tingles. As if the story would not end where the pages stopped, and the ink ran out. I'm buying this book so that I might share it with my girlfriend, and others who might benefit from its...legacy. I strongly recommend it.
Rating:  Summary: Good start, disappointing ending Review: This book raises a major question- "What makes human existence worthwhile?" - and provides a fairly unconvincing answer extremely unconvincingly- "Constantly asking questions."This "question" is part of the "story", so when the answer begins to seem like a failure (2/3 of the way through), so does the book.
Rating:  Summary: Starts great, and ends a bit low Review: The book's first two parts are some of Couplands best writting, but the last part is hard to follow and dosn't quite keep the pace, and turns in to an entire differnt story. But it's still very much worth reading, if you're a Coupland fan.
Rating:  Summary: Overated, selfindulgent, depressing - don't bother Review: I was really disappointed with this load of tosh masquerading as deep thought. Coupland's view of the future as seen through the eyes of a bunch of now familiar slackers is grim. It doesn't help that there isn't a single sympathetic character to empathise with. The novel veers all over the place, unsure of where he's going Coupland sends us into the realms of the bizarre. Some may consider this novel clever and insightful, I consider it the most pretentious book I've read in a very long time. Is there no hope for humanity? Not while this guy's still writing.
Rating:  Summary: one star is one star too many! Review: An insult to our generation. The characters are all bunch of losers and I don't care what happens to any of them. If they are all that's left of this world, we're better of dead! Let the cockroaches rise and dominate the world. The only good thing about the book was that it was SHORT!
Rating:  Summary: Dont believe the one star reviews ! Review: This is Couplands best book to date, thoughtful, engaging and full of lucid imagery . One of the most enchanting books of the last few years .
Rating:  Summary: Doesn't match up to his earlier works Review: Girlfriend in Coma started off in an engaging way, but fizzled out in the second half. I was on the verge of giving up on it half way through. This book hardly matches up to Copland's earlier works like GenX and Microserfs.
Rating:  Summary: Coupland continues to forge new ground Review: Coupland continues to do us all a favor by describing the world from a previously unnoticed perspective. His innovations in language and storyline are an exciting change of pace from the status quo. Even so, his quirky, often cynical observations are an acquired taste for those who have not grasped this brand of grunge-techno-pop-iconic-insider literature. He will surely be studied by young writers in ten or twenty years.
Rating:  Summary: Drivel Review: What an awful, disappointing novel. I'm a huge fan of Coupland's earlier books - in Generation X, Shampoo Planet and (especially) Microserfs he cheerleads for modern youthful popular culture, portraying it not as the dumbed-down, empty chatter of MTV brainwashees with 15-second attention spans, but as a perfectly valid way of viewing the world and interacting with others. His characters are real and vivid, and when they achieve growth, they do so without having to renounce all they are and embrace more "grown up" ideas. But the biggest problem with "Girlfriend" is not that Coupland betrays his earlier books, rather that he betrays the characters in this one. They start off as believable people, but end up as pawns in a ridiculously contrived plot, cyphers for musings on life and death that want to be deep and meaningful but boil down to the deflatingly banal "hey man, the hippies were right all along. Modern life is meaningless - we should, like, give more, y'know?". The characters' actions don't even make sense in the novel's own context - you just don't buy the way they act, which is something that never happened in Coupland's earlier books, however oddly their characters behaved. Coupland used to be one of my favourite writers - I just hope that he's going through some sort of early mid-life crisis, and that he'll get all this spiritual claptrap out of his system before he sits down to write his next book.
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