Rating: 
Summary: mayberry mystique
Review: This is the first Jonathan Carroll title I've ever read. I won't go into describing the plot, you can get that from the many reviews this book has already accumulated. I must admit, this book is inconsistent, there are times I had a very difficult time putting it down. Yet, other times, I literally dreaded picking up the book. I'm still processing my first experience of Carroll. I'm somewhat disappointed, and left wondering about too many loose ends, but I'm still willing to give him a another try because I can see the wonderful traits of an excellent author. I know from reading other reviews, Carroll is obviously very much loved by his fans and I do not wish to 'dog' him and I would very much like to see the side of his style that is so amazing. I do believe that this book is probably not the best of the list, nor is it the best one to begin reading for a first Carroll novel.
Rating: 
Summary: A wonderful fantasy
Review: Frannie McCabe, a former juvenile delinquent, has settled into a content, middle-aged existence as a police officer in Crane's View. Then, one day, he starts to care for a stray dog, which promptly dies in the middle of his office floor. This starts off a chain of strange and fantastical events, involving versions of himself from different points in his life, a threat to his wife's health, and a mysterious billionaire, along with the dead dog, which keeps reappearing.I'm not explaining this nearly as well as Carroll writes it. This is a wonderful book, exploring the nature of time and how it changes us all. It is an elegant, neat book, and a wonderful read.
Rating: 
Summary: Wooden mind reading more Carroll
Review: Thanks to Amazon's You may also like... I picked up this one, and now I think I have a new favorite author. This is a truly creative book with wonderful characters and a convoluted but engaging plot. Man takes in three legged dog. Dog dies but refuses to stay buried or dead. Man talks to aliens, time-travels, changes his life, and sees the Beatles. Tears, surprises, and just the right amout of hilarity thrown in. I'm glad Carroll has written so many, I won't have to wait to read his next one.
Rating:
Summary: The Shock of Versimilitude
Review: I rarely have time for fiction anymore, but I heard an excerpt from The Wooden Sea read aloud on NPR. Naturally, I couldn't remember the name of the book, or the author for that matter, but the wrting was so powerful and zesty--so much like the best of Dashell Hammett--that I tracked it down on the NPR web site. It turned out that the excerpt was the first page, and if the rest of the book is not quite as good, it is ALMOST as good. That's why the four stars instead of the five. Carroll's talent for conveying a setting is so strong it's almost unnerving. The story is set in what I take to be a small town along the Hudson, north of New York City. I know what those towns are like (Irvington, Croton, Hastings, Dobbs Ferry et al.), know what they were like in the time he is describing. Carroll absolutely nails it. There was also a tiny detail about an old fart with a Jaguar. I recognized him immediately. It was my father (or someone ... like him), and believe me, this little detail gave me the shakes. The central character, Frannie McCabe, is police chief in this small town, no small thing given his teen years as a total screw-up. Yet its really not a contradiction: Frannie young and Frannie mature is simply a guy who doesn't take any crap, and he has worked his way into a job where he doesn't have to. Hard bitten and a tad cynical he may be, but he is also caring, even loving, and thus is someone you don't mind spending some time with. Frannie has a serious need to know what's going on. He's supposed to know what's going on. He's the top cop. But what starts going on gets weirder and weirder. Time seems to have slipped its moorings, and reality keeps replaying itself, like a film moving back and forth through an editing machine. And that's the thing: reality really is being edited in subtle and not so subtle ways. When Frannie finds the editors, he wonders (naturally enough) whether they are messengers from God. No, they're not. I won't spoil it for people who haven't read this, but suffice to say here that the time benders are only slightly less clueless than we are. I found the fantasy/supernatural aspect quite plausible. Some people like this stuff, some people don't. I didn't think I'd like it, but I did. It had a certain spiritual resonance without being the slightest bit preachy, and some of the concluding imagery was so emotionally engaging it put tears in my eyes. Funnily enough, what I didn't find quite plausble was Franny being the chief of police. He's just too much of a rule breaker, too insubordinate. To me, he would have been better placed as a detective, but this is a quibble. Immediately after reading The Wooden Sea I picked up Land of Laughs, which was also excellent. As I say, I rarely have time for fiction anymore, so that should give you a clue about how much I enjoyed this.
Rating:
Summary: Unusual and interesting slipstream novel
Review: I'm only slightly acquainted with the work of Jonathan Carroll: I've read one early novel (Bones of the Moon) and several short stories. Still, I had an idea what to expect: a contemporary setting, veering off into very strange territory at some time; an ordinary person, deeply in love, faced with an unexpected and unexplainable threat to those he loves; and fine writing with a mixture of almost goofy humourand wrenching tragedy. And that's what we get here. (Writers who come to mind as comparison points are William Browning Spencer, Jonathan Lethem, and Bradley Denton.) The Wooden Sea is narrated by Frannie McCabe, the 47-year old police chief of a small town, Crane's View, New York. Frannie is on his second marriage, and he has a teenage stepdaughter. He is sometimes plagued by the town's collective memory: he was rather a juvenile delinquent as a youth, and, in high school, he dated the girl who is now the mayor; but by and large he seems respected and happy. One day he adopts, almost perforce, a sickly three-legged dog named Old Vertue -- within a few days the dog is dead, and Frannie's attempts to bury the dog seem to set in motion a series of increasingly surrealistic events. The strangeness starts out small, as it were: the buried dog disappears, and needs to be reburied. The dog turns up again, sort of, in an Old Master painting. And a high school girl dies of an overdose, leaving behind a notebook with tantalizing hints that she too was involved in these strange events. From this point things become very odd indeed. The novel involves trips both forward and backward in time. Frannie's 17-year old self becomes a major character, as does a sinister businessman from decades in the future. Frannie finds himself presented with an ultimatum -- figure out what he needs to do in a week, or else -- with almost no idea of what he is to figure out, or what the "else" is. And this is to say nothing of the gods and/or aliens. In a way, this book might be called "Science Fiction Magical Realism": it uses Science Fictional imagery in ways reminiscent of how more usual "Magical Realism" uses Fantastical imagery. On first reading, I had some difficulty with this: there's a temptation to make the book be about the Science Fictional events, and it really doesn't work that way. They don't end up making outward sense, and they aren't really properly resolved. As one fellow reader told me "It's Carroll's usual 'One darn thing after another'." But reading the book more as a mainstream (or, dare I say, slipstream) novel -- that is, as a story about the life of Francis McCabe -- works much better. We get a portrait of a believable man, a good man, and a happy man, facing a crisis from out of nowhere. The characters are very nicely done: Frannie, his younger self, his wife Magda and stepdaughter Pauline, his strange neighbour George Dalemwood. The action, for all its weirdness, is always interesting, though at times I felt a bit disconnected from things: at times things simply got too weird. The resolution is moving and bittersweet. The Wooden Sea is a fine new novel from a very interesting writer.
Rating: 
Summary: This Emperor Has No Clothes
Review: I was speechless when I found out that this novel, which starts out as an intriguing, surreal mystery, devolves steadily into an ending which is both idiotic (space aliens and God) and disgustingly sweet in its moral (appreciate life at every stage of your growth). Carroll is supposed to be this great fantasy writer who has a cult following. All I can say is, keep them away from me! Too bad a writer with Carroll's talent has written such a convoluted stinker. I plan to avoid all of his other work like the plague!
Rating:
Summary: Great Characters With Real Potential; Falls Flat
Review: This is not Carroll's best work. Though packed with rich real characters and vivid surreal but somehow true situations that are the hallmark of Carroll's work, the book promises much more than it eventually delivers. If you must read it, consider stopping before the final chapters, otherwise try the Teeth of Angels or The Land of Laughs.
Rating:
Summary: I Love It
Review: this book was a chance purchase but I would buy it all over again...its strange and wonderful unique story
Rating:
Summary: Best yet by author--memorable characters, laugh out loud
Review: This is the best JC novel yet for me. Bones of the Moon had been my former favorite(and first by JC for me). I have always found his prose entertaining and fast. Dean Koontz's writing has a similar comfortable voice that moves along. His books are shorter and more terse than most writers. His prose isn't flowery. I find his romantic inclusions in his stories to be entertaining, real, not gushy. Top of my list in this book is that Frannie McCabe is a great character. He is memorable, very real, distinct, likable. His talk and attitude actually made me laugh out loud at some quips--something books never manage to do for me--despite loving comedy in movies and tv. I have read about 5 of JC's books and with this book I realized that he is not merely reusing people or place names from book to book but that there is some story building...a pantheon of characters and places. There is a larger story being told through many novels. Despite playing with a concept (I will not reveal) that I feel has been used to death, especially in SciFi, I still enjoyed the treatment. I was worried at one point that it would just be another of those stories. I was only disappointed the that book ended... I wanted more.
Rating:
Summary: My Favorite Book
Review: I can sum up "The Wooden Sea", by Jonathan Carroll, in one, quick statement: Absolutely the best book that I have ever read. Through all 300 odd pages I was as intrigued, compelled, and astounded as I was when I first began the story at a Borders cafe.
To begin with, I hadn't read a Jon Carroll book in a long time and upon seeing advertisements for his North American tour--posted on Neil Gaiman's (another favorite author! read him!) online journal--imediately began reminiscing about his older books. Since I am only fifteen years old, and he was not coming to my town, I gave my sister a ring--whose city would house Mr. Carroll for one evening--and politely asked her if she could get me an autograph of his latest book. Of course, being a good sister, she complied and on November 14 got my copy of "White Apples" signed.
Knowing I had a book signed by him, my interest in Jonathan Carroll was renewed doubly. And on one of my usual bookstore visits, I came across "The Wooden Sea". I decided to give it a read over a cup of coffee. Though the coffee I had ordered tasted unusualy delicious, it surely was not as delicious as the book I had begun to read. Jonathan draws you so tightly into this story and all the characters that I felt that I was Frannie McCabe--the main character-- and that I was experiencing all the uncanny madness that he was. Jonathan also does such an incredible job of making this fantastical story--which some authors could not--believable.
Reading this book is like staring at a Salvidor Dali painting. The scene is so surreal and flat out strange that you know none of this could ever happen, but Jonathan succeeds enormously in making you, in the far reaches of the back of your mind, ask: What if?
This is my favorite book of all time and I will treasure the magic that Jonathan Carroll has given me til the day they lock shut my coffin. I HIGHLY reccomend "The Wooden Sea"--along with the almost-equally good "White Apples"--to anyone who knows how to read. You won't regret reading this book. -Dave
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