Reviews for The Monsters of Templeton

The average rating for The Monsters of Templeton based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2010-01-30 00:00:00 Hubertus Peter yay!! my suspicions have been confirmed - i am officially not a book snob! i oscillate between thinking i might be a little bit of one, and that any forays i may make into teen fiction or silly bodice rippers that involve byron in some way are just accidents; flaws... on goodreads.com, i feel mostly like the dummy of the bunch, which is a totally comfortable and understandable place for me to be. but then at work, and in my readers advisory class, i feel like the biggest book elitist of all time. because they are all talking about their romance novelists and their chick-lit and cozy mysteries and COME ON!! these are future librarians!! one of the biggest no-nos in librarian school is to respect the patron and not look down on their reading choices, but it doesn't say anything about not judging your peers. so i do. and i felt like an asshole when they asked what i was reading, and i mumbled "oh the third part in this really complicated norwegian trilogy about television and what makes up the catalog of a life, told without a linear narrative, and no, it's good - it's like proust". blank faces. but this book i really loved, and i was reading the reviews of it today here on goodreads.com, and so many people hated it for its lack of characterization or weak narrative but i honestly didn't notice anything like that in this. i noticed it big time in under the dome, but i thought this book was really fun, and had something interesting to say, which i did not think w/r/t mr. king. sorry, dude. i am very basic - i want a story told to me. do it whatever way you need to - be as roundabout as kjaerstad or proust, be as straightforward as steinbeck, but tell me a story and make it unique. and i thought this story was great. it's about a woman unexpectedly pregnant by a man not her own, who returns to her hometown to figure out what to do about it, and then becomes preoccupied with her own family history (i.e. - who's her daddy??). did i mention her town has a lake monster? well, it does. and that is awesome. i thought, when i was reading it, that it was a wonderful book, particularly a wonderful woman's-book, that covers motherhood, yes, but also the mother-daughter dynamic, sexual complications, nostalgia and rage. all good lady-feelings. dunno, i liked it, but i also like some zombie books - make your choices. so officially not a snob, but still will never read harry potter... come to my blog!

Review # 2 was written on 2008-02-14 00:00:00 Daniel Herman Does this ever happen to you? When I read something, I generally hear the words pretty much spoken inside my head as I read them. Mostly . . . though sometimes, when I'm reading a truly great book, I start to feel that what I'm hearing inside my skull is more akin to music, almost, like some sort of lovely concerto version of the words on the page. But then, sometimes, with not-so-great books, what I start to hear after I've been reading for a while is more of an irksome whine or a grating rumble, like the sound of a car being driven on a flat tire. And reading The Monsters of Templeton, I found my head filled with an ongoing screech, loudly interrupted by repeated painful jarring clanks as, every couple of pages, my eye was dragged across yet another brutally inapt metaphor or wince-inducing misuse of the poor English language. This book has all the usual hallmarks of bad pretentious fiction--characters that the reader is told repeatedly are wickedly funny, though we're never so blessed as to hear one of them say anything witty. Modern-day characters with names like Primus Dwyer, Aristabulus Mudge, Zeke Felcher. Yes, Felcher. Oh, and Reverend John Melkovitch. Yes, John Melkovitch. Overlarded sentences. Obscure and utterly unpersuasive similes. Misused words. Patent absurdities given as plot points. "She patted my hand, leaving cheese flakes on my fingers." Cheese . . . flakes? ". . . the streets, as familiar to us as the whorls in our own fingertips." I don't believe I have the slightest f. clue what my fingerprints look like. Do you? Clarissa, who "could quote Nietszsche . . . was the most puntastic person I'd ever met," comes down with lupus, and they discuss "famous people who'd had it: Flannery O'Connor (A good disease is not hard to find, Clarissa had punned then. . . ." WHAT? That is not a pun. "I looked into the mirror and saw that the pen I was chewing had exploded over my face, even dripping under my chin and onto my neck, and my teeth and tongue were stained, and that I, in my ignorance, had smeared black ink all over my cheeks and forehead." WHAT?!? Come on. Really. Could that happen? The author seems not to know that there is kind of a big difference between a cross and a crucifix, and that the two words really can't be used interchangeably when the person wearing the cross is a protestant. She thinks that someone "dressed in a pink Polo shirt underneath a yellow sweater" would look "as yuppie as a person who was not a yuppie but wanted to look like a yuppie could look." Yuppie? Maybe it's been so long since anyone's heard that word that we've forgotten that yuppie and preppie are not the same thing? She thinks it's possible to punch someone and "split one of his teeth in two." Split? She thinks storms have epicenters. She thinks that "I called Clarissa for hours" is the same as "I talked on the phone with Clarissa for hours." She thinks the phrase "He began to write and write, with a promiscuity that's surprising. . . ." is somehow sensible. Her narrator repeatedly--repetitively, even--tells us what a tough smart cookie she is, yet she somehow never manages to question her mother's assertion that she was born after ten and a half months in the womb. Oh, sheesh, I could go on and on. But I'll cut myself short and give out this advice: Don't read it.