Zhefeng Zhang Zhang থেকে Conway, SC, USA
** spoiler alert ** As I clicked the box just now, indicating that I'd be willing to sell/swap my copy, I actually thought - will someone please take this off my hands? I was unequivocally disappointed in this book & this story. I thought the concept of the story, an examination of several characters who are all very different and interesting, all living in this "mythic Manhattan apartment building", was a great start. But the execution couldn't have been done more poorly. I read in another reader's review that each chapter felt like it was "born of the sort of exercise you’d be assigned in a beginning creative writing class" and I couldn't agree more. The details of the story and the writing itself was ridiculously trite and uncreative. Where do I begin, b/c there are so many examples to name... Are we really supposed to believe that each of two of the main characters eat at only one restaurant (Flat Michael's & Duranigan's) every weeknight, every single week? The server at Flat Michael's, the perpetually smiling, short & stout man named Juan who has trouble pronouncing certain English words, happens to be the only server to any of the characters in this story? The only bar that any character in this story ever frequented was Minotaur's? In NYC of all places? They all just happen to be friends and/or former pleasures of Patrick Rigg? how ridiculously convenient. And after reading practically an entire chapter about the acrid "smell" of evil emanating from Patrick, in the following chapter Schickler gratuitously throws in the sentence about the nurses at the hospital immediately liking James because "perhaps they could see, or even emell, the traces of passion on him..."????? Are you kidding me? UGH. (and what's sad is that there are so many more examples to name, but I think you get the point.) Please Mr. Schickler, give me a break and try not to make every detail have to apply to at least two of your characters. Try to invent a few more restaurants and bars your characters might patron. And for god's sake give these people some semblance of normalcy via the form of MULTIPLE friends, not just the group of mismatched characters in each of your chapters. It's practically insulting to your readers. I do recognize that this was Schickler's attempt at allowing all of these characters to enter into eachother's lives, but in so doing he made each of the characters so completely one-dimensional, I couldn't help but close the book in annoyance. He completely missed the mark on this one. Before reading some of the other reviews on goodreads, I hadn't thought of each of these chapters as a set of short stories. And after giving that some thought, that's the only tiny bit of praise I can think to give this book and this author. Looking at each chapter by itself, I can see how some of them could succeed on their own. If that's the case, perhaps this book should have been labeled as such - a collection of short stories, and Schickler should have avoided altogether his whole attempt to intertwine the lives of all the characters. I can see this as a beach read for a reader not interested in having to think too hard, but besides that it's not much more than a waste of time. I almost gave up on finishing this book twice, but was rooting hopefully for Schickler, that his writing style may get better as the book progressed, but that turned out to be a disappointment as well.