Rating: 
Summary: Full of sound and fury
Review: Carroll piles on layers of intriguing mysteries, but the puzzle pieces never ultimately come together. This is a fun and well-written book, but it's better at the micro scale than the macro; the overall structure is shapeless and half-baked. Don't expect answers.
Rating: 
Summary: Carroll does not compromise his story.
Review: Jonathan Carroll has written a world fantasy award nominee in his book The Wooden Sea. I have read such announcements about it, and I have read it. In the Wooden Sea, his hero is a small town Sheriff named Frannie. Frannie is a guy with a past that is tied to the central locale depicted in TWS. He has a wife and a stepdaughter. Early in the book, inexplicable happenings set up the fantasy in the story, and for a good part of the book, Frannie is trying to unravel this fantastic mystery. And the story works incredibly well as such. I think many readers will enjoy the story until the mystery is resolved well before the end of the book. When it does, however, Carroll chooses to bulldog his way through, making his points as he has intended, regardless of anyone's opinion. I loved this book all the way through to the end, and to me Carroll seems to be making these points: In The Wooden Sea, people themselves are alien and can only understand themselves in hindsight, and that outsiders cannot hope to understand anyone in particular. This seems plain to me when Frannie is asked to save humanity, with he himself a member of it.
Rating:
Summary: Interesting
Review: One of my wife's more literate friends (actually, the only one) gave me this book because she thought I could relate to the gimpy dog ("Old Vertue") who is somewhat central to this story. Well, I'm not sure if I agree with that, but the book was an interesting, if not terrific, read.A policeman with the same name as my old nanny (Frannie!) experiences many unusual things in this story. In fact, this book is not grounded in the real world, so those of you who like novels based in reality will probably want to skip this one. It veers way south of Murakamiville as the out-of-this-world craziness is pretty much all encompassing. Some examples: A three-legged dog shows up, dies, is buried, and shows up alive again. More than once. Adult Frannie is visited by a teenaged version of himself (in both the present AND the future). Aliens abound (ridiculous!). Time travel mayhem is everywhere and history gets changed. If you can deal with all of this, you will probably enjoy this novel. It's a fairly engaging mystery wrapped in a tale of love and the bizarreness of life. Narration is first person and at times both humorous and moving. I generally liked the story, but felt it a tad too creative, convenient, and otherworldly to really get into. Still...I did finish it and I told my wife's self-satisfied friend that I loooooved it.
Rating: 
Summary: Wonderfully creative and imaginative
Review: I'm not even sure where to begin when reviewing this book. Perhaps the best thing to say is that I had fun reading this book, and go from there. This was my first encounter with Jonathan Carroll, and I was pleased to read a book that was both highly intelligent and at the same time original and laugh-out-loud funny. As other reviewers have written, don't even bother trying to categorize this book ... trying to capture this book within one genre does it no justice. The overall plot is science fiction-esque, with time travel and an idea of universal destiny which reminded me a lot of a favorite sci-fi book of mine: Arthur C. Clarke's "Childhood's End." At the same time, this book has a fast-paced, mind-bending surrealism about itself, and is written in a style that is pleasantly "American," much like John Irving. Clever, thrilling, and wild, The Wooden Sea is a contemporary classic. A fun and thought-provoking read you don't want to miss out on.
Rating:
Summary: The New York Times
Review: "Carroll confounds the genre-rigid standards of most literary criticism, crossing from fantasy to psychological thriller to science fiction as easily as Frannie ventures back and forth in time. In the end, whether what happens in this novel is mischief or metaphysics doesn't really matter. What does is that Carroll turns them both into his own distinctive kind of intelligent entertainment."
Rating: 
Summary: Defies explanation, but definitely wastes your time.
Review: Reading some of the 5 Star reviews that this book has been given makes me feel as though I am in one of the mind-numbing time warps that Jonathan Carroll seems to enjoy creating; nothing is as it seems. Although this novel started out with exciting promise, interesting characters, and fascinating incidents, Carroll seems to become so involved with his own complicated plot twists that he forgets where he was going. The story loses its thread and Carroll, rather than putting it back on track, just uses the time honored fantasy trick of ignoring the inconsistencies, time shifting the scenarios, and starting a new thread without any explanation. It's like riding in a race car with a driver who doesn't know how to shift gears; all jumps and jerks and false starts that fail to get you where you want to go. It seemed as if Carroll simply got tired of writing or was so confused by his own twists and turns and double loops that he just decided to stop the story with no satifactory explanation or culmination. I found this book to be the biggest waste of time in recent memory and no amount of touting it as alternative fiction can make it worthwhile to mainstream readers.
Rating:
Summary: Great book, great writer
Review: This is a wonderful book. The characterizations are so well done, especially McCabe. It works on all levels--the emotional, the intellectual, and the bizarre. Makes you want to read more of Carroll if you haven't already.
Rating:
Summary: Your mind trying to digest a koan...
Review: "How do you row a boat on a wooden sea?" Well, for anyone who has ever meditated on koan, this book comes very close to mirroring what happens to the ego as it wrestles with such a question. The book starts innocently enough but then begins its descent into a weird universe as the main character flips back and forth through time trying to answer a question. The characters are certainly not 'normal' in any sense of the word - think PK Dick or perhaps J Lethem - and the situations are certainly run-of-the-mill. But the questions Carroll is trying to wrestle with are not easily asked, let alone trying to come up with answers. Starting from a quite mundane state the main character, McCabe, begins his descent into weirdness that culminates with time-traveling aliens. Carroll always treads a razor-like line between the mundane and the weird, much like Murakami. I still prefer Murakami's stylistic touches, or perhaps I should say, lack of stylistic touches. That is, Carroll appears much less neutral in his role as storyteller than Murakami. Both writers certainly seem to share a fascination with what is always lurking below apparently bland surfaces. It would appear to me that Carroll is trying to allude to some sort of involvement in an Eastern tradition such as Zen. Certainly his novels have a strong current of mysticism and strong warnings about tempering the ego's drive.
Rating:
Summary: A Wonderful Trek into Fantasy
Review: When I learned of this book from NPR's summer list,
I thought why not take a chance. Well, I was not dissappointed.
While the plot and events got confused, with the real-world fantasy elements like in an especially confusing Star Trekesque space-time continuum disruption, the book was entertaining and quite a good choice for a somewhat brief foray into quite a different and convoluted world.
Rating:
Summary: Interesting metaphysical exploration of identity
Review: After a stange, abused dog has been adopted, buried and resurrected by Frannie McCabe, McCabe's friend asks him if by way of explantion McCabe wants a logical or a metaphysical answer. The book veers the direction of the metaphysical. We then follow McCabe thru a series of time shifts in which the 47 year-old McCabe of the story is joined by a younger (or older) McCabe. McCabe is too "find the answer" to a question that is unknown even to those manipulating the time continuum. This complex plot requires careful planning which is carried out with some minor flaws. The disappearance of a couple well known for domestic violence and the death of a teen from an overdose of heroin, seem to be arbitrary devices to start the trajectory of the novel even when one has the "why" behind the bizarre occurences. In the final chapters, the author's depiction of McCabe's health and strength seem inconsistent despite the plot at one point explicitly adding strength to McCabe. The story is sprinkled with gentle humor - how G.G. gets his name, the secret language of love, trivia contests based on 50's TV, the dog Old Vertue being identified from a 400 year-old painting... It is also sprinkled with quotations from other authors that are wise in a 'working-stiff' way. Throughout the story, we see McCabe grappling with who he was, who he is, and who he will become. The cause of this grappling is standard but inventive sci-fi metaphysical fanatasy. The book as a whole - an interesting diversion.
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