Rating: 
Summary: Gorgeous sci-fi western bildungsroman--what else?
Review: "Gorgeous" is the adjective that kept coming to mind after reading this. A great hybrid of science-fiction, western and coming-of-age novels (a sort of post-bildungsroman story). I really cannot understand why other readers found the grown-ups in the novel two-dimensional. They were absolutely real, and Efram Nugent is a bigger-than-life character that reaches mythical status. One should thank Lethem for his ability to show how surrealistic the United States can be. And his absolutely perfect, terse style, that is getting better and better as he goes on! After this, one wonders what comes next... definitely one of the best novels of the 90s.
Rating: 
Summary: Odd, but strangely compelling
Review: A copy of "Girl in Landscape" has been kicking around my house for a few months now. What compelled me to buy it escapes me. Especially since I tend to avoid coming-of-age stories. But there it was and there I was on a rainy Sunday afternoon. I got through the first quarter of the book and was getting ready to put it down when the story grabbed me. Jonathan Lethem has written a wonderfully engrossing novel set in a strange yet familiar setting. A strong case can be made comparing "Girl in Landscape" to many westerns, but what came to my mind was the old TV series "The Twilight Zone". Extraordinary outside influences driving an all to human story. But, like the Rod Serling classic, the world of the Archbuilders can be a dark and desolate place full of human weakness, frailty, bigotry, desire and emotion. This is a fine book worthy of a larger audience. I'm sorry I didn't read it sooner.
Rating: 
Summary: Good Set-Up Frittered Away
Review: Finished reading Jonathan Lethem's "Girl In Landscape" on Monday. Wanted to read his "As She Climbed Across The Table" book but settled for this one after repeated attempts to find that earlier work locally ended in failure. "Girl" started out nicely, with quick, wispy sketches of a family and a planet in crisis, but it soon became bogged down in rather conventional plotting. Lethem has a nice facility for limning the interactions between children, but his adults all seemed two-dimensional to me - like the grown-up characters who put in cameo appearances in a kiddie lit novel or (at worst) as the shrill musical voices of a Peanuts special. He does a good job of setting up his alien planet with intriguing ruins, gentle aliens who have a goofy way with words, and ghostly "house deer", but then he never really explores its possibilities. The sexual tensions of a girl going through puberty are touched upon too obliquely to provide insight, and the violent ending seems a starkly unoriginal importation from conventional fiction - an importation thrust into a world that cried out for something better and more imaginative. I had high hopes for this book, given the good things I'd heard about "As She Climbed Across The Table", but I finished it feeling cheated of what it could have been. What magic it did contain was, in the end, overshadowed by the lingering taste of unpleasant events and hopeless relationships. Maybe if the book hadn't both begun and ended with a pointless death. Maybe if Lethem hadn't thrown in yet another in the middle for good measure....
Rating: 
Summary: A third rate effort from a first rate author.
Review: First let me say that I greatly admire Jonathan Lethem. No one can fault his ambitious and aggressive imagination and creativity. He possesses a truly unique worldview and writing style. He has written some truly wonderful novels--most notably Gun, with Occasional Music and Motherless Brooklyn. However, all of that notwithstanding, he is also a very frustrating writer in that his body of work is very uneven. There are ideas that no doubt looked quite tempting in the conceptual stage that should have been dumped in the writing phase as it should have been clear it wasn't going to work as a novel. Girl in Landscape is a case in point. The book is essentially an experiment in a change of context--in this case, a classic "western" set in a sci-fi context; instead of the classic American Western we have the classic Alpha Centuri (or whatever) western. This is not a new conceptual vehicle for Lethem; Gun with Occasional Music also followed this model. However Gun was a focused novel--a detective story first and foremost. Girl, on the other hand, is an unfocused mess. Is it a "coming of age" story or a "displaced" western? Unfortunately, it tries to be both and succeeds in being neither. Whereas in other Lethem novels the weird tableau of scene and character support and enhance the story, here they seem to take it over. In the end, the scenery is more compelling than the character and story. I suppose it's a small price to pay--a few unmemorable and disappointing novels one must endure to experience the true joy of Lethem's extraordinary, first rate novels, but I think both reader and author would be better served by a more disciplined approach that sidelined marginal efforts such as this one.
Rating:
Summary: A third rate effort from a first rate author.
Review: First let me say that I greatly admire Jonathan Lethem. No one can fault his ambitious and aggressive imagination and creativity. He possesses a truly unique worldview and writing style. He has written some truly wonderful novels--most notably Gun, with Occasional Music and Motherless Brooklyn. However, all of that notwithstanding, he is also a very frustrating writer in that his body of work is very uneven. There are ideas that no doubt looked quite tempting in the conceptual stage that should have been dumped in the writing phase as it should have been clear it wasn't going to work as a novel. Girl in Landscape is a case in point. The book is essentially an experiment in a change of context--in this case, a classic "western" set in a sci-fi context; instead of the classic American Western we have the classic Alpha Centuri (or whatever) western. This is not a new conceptual vehicle for Lethem; Gun with Occasional Music also followed this model. However Gun was a focused novel--a detective story first and foremost. Girl, on the other hand, is an unfocused mess. Is it a "coming of age" story or a "displaced" western? Unfortunately, it tries to be both and succeeds in being neither. Whereas in other Lethem novels the weird tableau of scene and character support and enhance the story, here they seem to take it over. In the end, the scenery is more compelling than the character and story. I suppose it's a small price to pay--a few unmemorable and disappointing novels one must endure to experience the true joy of Lethem's extraordinary, first rate novels, but I think both reader and author would be better served by a more disciplined approach that sidelined marginal efforts such as this one.
Rating: 
Summary: A lowcore sci-fi book
Review: i don't knoe exactlt what's the definition for hardcore science fiction book, i guss a hardcore is a book with complex story, ant lot's of unexplained science facts. this story is the inverse of this - the story is very plane - about some pilgrims on a new planet, and there is defently more fiction then science. basicly the book is very easy for read, and is told from the sight of a growing teen age girl. throught her eyes the story is being told, about her growing up, and the weired population that inhabit the planet. this story is not a thriller, so ther isn't much action, it's more like historic novell, but in the future, i missed the science parts - almost no science in this book, and of course i missed the action, and the thrill. basicly it's a nice story but not a great book.
Rating:
Summary: Lethem's fascinating
Review: I don't quite know how to rate Lethem's books. They're not like anything else I've read, but I find them fascinating. "Girl in Landscape" is the story of Pella Marsh, a young girl who's just lost her mother and is trying to learn to be a woman in a VERY strange new world. Lethem always finds an interesting way to look at the English language. In "Motherless Brooklyn", he used a 30-year-old orphan with Tourette's Syndrome as a narrator -- great book, by the way. In this book, he uses the "Archbuilders" - the ones who built the society on this new planet, but have since moved on - to explore the way our words often mean much more (or less) than we intend. Lethem's not for everyone, but you should try at least one of his genre-busting books, just to see what he can do.
Rating:
Summary: wonderful
Review: I finished this book a week ago and I still can't stop thinking about it
Rating:
Summary: interesting book....
Review: I hardly know how to describe this novel. Lethem is a difficult author to categorize, and Girl in Landscape is even dodgier to quite nail down. On the surface it is: a science fiction story, a modern day western set on a strange planet, a coming of age story. The best possible description of this novel is that it is a normal story told on a strange world. It is easy to be distracted by the setting, a strange world that was formed by the Archbuilders, who built up the society and world and then left, leaving only a remnant from their society. The world of the Archbuilders is the new frontier, the new western. Pella Marsh is thirteen years old. Her mother has recently died and the rest of her family is moving to the planet of the Archbuilders. There are only a handful of other settlers there, people who are there for a variety of reasons. Some express an interest in the Archbuilders, others a xenophobic fear. Upon arrival on the planet, the Marsh family is told that they will have have to take pills to conteract the virus in the atmosphere. The father chooses not to. The virus does not make Pella ill, but rather makes a change so that, as the Archbuilders say, the children can learn from adults. This is a fascinating story that I hesitate to rank among the best of Lethem. Even though there is a minimalist western feel to the story, it also almost feels like Lethem is trying to do too much, tell such a branching story that something is lost. Don't get me wrong, this is a good book and a good story, but compared to Lethem's best, it falls short.
Rating:
Summary: interesting book....
Review: I hardly know how to describe this novel. Lethem is a difficult author to categorize, and Girl in Landscape is even dodgier to quite nail down. On the surface it is: a science fiction story, a modern day western set on a strange planet, a coming of age story. The best possible description of this novel is that it is a normal story told on a strange world. It is easy to be distracted by the setting, a strange world that was formed by the Archbuilders, who built up the society and world and then left, leaving only a remnant from their society. The world of the Archbuilders is the new frontier, the new western. Pella Marsh is thirteen years old. Her mother has recently died and the rest of her family is moving to the planet of the Archbuilders. There are only a handful of other settlers there, people who are there for a variety of reasons. Some express an interest in the Archbuilders, others a xenophobic fear. Upon arrival on the planet, the Marsh family is told that they will have have to take pills to conteract the virus in the atmosphere. The father chooses not to. The virus does not make Pella ill, but rather makes a change so that, as the Archbuilders say, the children can learn from adults. This is a fascinating story that I hesitate to rank among the best of Lethem. Even though there is a minimalist western feel to the story, it also almost feels like Lethem is trying to do too much, tell such a branching story that something is lost. Don't get me wrong, this is a good book and a good story, but compared to Lethem's best, it falls short.
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