. . .what we wanted to do was unusual. Pure. Live with the land, not on it. Live outside the evil of commerce and make our own lives from scratch. Let our love be a beacon to light up the world.Oh, silly, silly hippies . . . thinkin' you can change the world by doin' lots of drugs and not bathing . . .Welcome to Arcadia, the finest in communal living!Here you'll get to ride out a New York winter in a tent, quonset hut, or bread truck while waiting for your Utopian palace to be restored.Prepare t...

Am I just the buzzkill who wouldn't drop acid at the party? Did someone shut off the volcano that fueled my lava lamp? How do I explain my huge disappointment in this book? I, who loved The Monsters of Templeton and Delicate Edible Birds, found Arcadia unreadable. Why? The story is slave to the style. Groff uses a floaty, present tense, semi-random flow that very nearly resembles a plot, but not quite. Everything is seen through the eyes of Bit, a little boy who somehow doesn't seem to be "all t...

There were parts of Arcadia I liked very much, especially the language and themes, but overall, I found it uneven. The first part, particularly, was a bit tough to get through, an overlong history of the commune Arcadia, told in the voice of a child whose parents helped found it under the leadership of a sketchy character named Handy. The fact there was little conflict in this first half of the book, along with the narrator’s voice, describing much but perceiving little, made this section less c...

This is an amazing book. I don't give 5 stars very often. The only author even reminiscent of Lauren Groff, is (early) Anne Tyler, only there is more depth to Lauren Groff's writing. But she does have the same gift for writing about family relationships, emotional reality. This book touched me really deeply--I have lived in an intentional community, and my mother died from ALS, like Bit's mother. This story is true, and moving, and very heartening. Interestingly, even though she writes from the

I don't know about this, you guys. I've heard good things about "Monsters of Templeton," so I was excited to read this, but I kind of have to say it left me going "so what?" This review is kind of spoiler-heavy, because I can't think of anything to do but say what happened, because I didn't love anything in particular enough to talk about it.SPOILERS!The first couple of sections deal with a boy growing up in a commune, which is fairly interesting, but certainly not a topic that hasn't been dealt...

Best to distrust retrospective radiance: gold dust settles over memory and makes it shine.…Pay attention, he thinks. Not to the grand gesture, but to the passing breath.I loved Fates and Furies, so Arcadia was a must-read for me. It’s the story of the rise, peak, and fall of a commune in upstate New York, and the effect that experience had on the survivors. It is told through the eyes of the first child born there, a boy named Bit, and told in four parts: when Bit is a small child, a teenager,

i had reservations about this book because, well, look at that cover. fucking hippies.but i should have known that lauren groff would write a spectacular book even if it was about fucking hippies. i have read all three of her books now, and while monsters of templeton is still far and away the winner in the "books by lauren groff" award ceremonies, this one is very very good.this novel focuses on bit, a child born into a hippie commune, and checks in with him during four periods in his life. whe...

Arcadia takes us from an enactment of utopia to the dawning of a dystopian nightmare in the span of its 280 pages. It focuses on Bit, the first child born into a 1960s hippy commune which begins with only a few charismatic acolytes and ends with thousands. We see Arcadia through his eyes, and he in turn sees it through the filter of Grimm’s fairy stories, the only book he has access to as a child. Groff does a really good job of showing us the world through a child’s sensibility – the wonder and...

We read books to be entertained, to be informed, to have a laugh, to escape the day-to-day. And then, every now and then, we stumble across a book that we read at just the right moment in our lives for us to be bewitched, transported and transformed.That just happened to me while reading Arcadia by Lauren Groff. This isn't a new novel—it was first published by Hyperion in 2012—and the fact of the matter is that I tried reading it four separate times before I finally was able to become absorbed b...

Some books grab you from the get-go, while some take a little time before they hook you completely. Lauren Groff's wonderful Arcadia fell in the latter category for me, but it was an investment well worth my time. This was a beautifully written book about family (biological and otherwise), love, responsibility, relationships, and the unique pull of one's upbringing. Arcadia is a commune that develops in the early 1970s in upstate New York, built around a dilapidated mansion called Arcadia House....

Oh, Lauren Groff. Your purple prose. Your absence of quotation marks. Your writing is actually quite beautiful, but that isn't good enough for you, apparently. What does it mean for a girl to have a "sweet cupcake face" anyway?I went back and forth between feeling like this book was a total slog and finding it utterly compelling. This is my second Lauren Groff book. With Fates and Furies, I loathed the first half and loved the second half. With Arcadia, my emotions didn't reach such extremes, bu...

So, the first section, experiencing that world through Bit, was emotionally provocative, well-written, sad, but deeply insightful into the emotional life of that sensitive boy. Beyond that, the book became somewhat formulaic for me and lost the thing that made it special. I was still interested in the story - in a beach-read, what-happens-next kind of way - but not engaged by the characters in the same way. One more criticism - beyond the main characters, there are so many others, especially amo...

Oh what a fine novel this is, one of the few I feel is worthy of the 5-star rating. This is a book that leaves you sad because it has ended, but also happy because you have read it and got to know Bit, his mother Hannah, and his father Abe, whom I wish could be real people who are greatly admired friends of mine living their lives of clarity and substance somewhere in the wilds of upstate New York, not so far from me.This is a finely crafted, exquisitely written, and particularly interesting nov...

Arcadia was the second novel by Lauren Groff, and may I add that she has become one of my favorite authors. Arcadia has been lauded as being a beautiful book and more or less a vision of a perfect world. One reviewer noted that she hated to leave . . . and I could hardly wait to get the hell out of Arcadia. Obviously there was a disconnect and I was an outlier in the midst of these glowing reviews. But that was in the first fifty pages and then I decided to trust the beautiful and lyrical writin...

Our narrator is Ridley Stoner – Bit or Little Bit as he is known, who is born to Hannah and Abe in their car as they are travelling with a group of idealists to Arcadia House. Arcadia House is the derelict mansion and it's surrounding fields, pastures and river which has been bequeathed to one of the group. Ridley was premature and weighed 3lbs; hence the name Bit. Arcadia whose vision is to “live with the land, not on land”, will be a true commune; you pool your resources, your goods, your food...

Your view of this book is likely to turn on two things: 1) whether you find the mystical and deeply sensitive hippie/child protagonist Bit a credible character, one worth spending 289 pages with; and 2) how much of Lauren Goff's vivid prose style you can stomach. Here's a good test. Try these four passages below; they nicely encapsulate Bit's musing mind. If they intrigue you, join the crowds of ecstatic reviewers. If their windy phoniness makes you retch, then don't bother.“The women washed clo...

Lauren Groff’s lovely and poignant Arcadia is a novel of sublime sensuality. It is redolent of the ripe, husky scent of pot and unwashed bodies, the strumming of guitars and gasps of lovemaking, the taste of warm blackberries plucked from the bush and popped into the mouth, the glow of naked flesh in moonlight, the feel of a mother’s soft, full breast, of a father’s muscled, callused hands. The key to the novel’s earthy nature is its narrator, Bit, who begins his story at the age of five. Childr...

Page by page through Lauren Groff’s story about a hippie commune in western New York, I kept worrying that it was too good to last. Not the commune — it’s a mess from the start — I’m talking about the novel, which unfolds one moment of mournful beauty after another. As she did in her inventive debut, “The Monsters of Templeton” (2008), Groff once again gives us a young person — in this case a boy — struggling to understand himself and his peculiar history. But this time, she’s moved beyond the l...

3.75This novel floats through the air and over the earth in three discrete sections (past/present/future? paradise/expulsion/return?), all filtered through the senses of the sensitive Bit, all cohering in unsentimental, muted tones. Though I enjoyed Groff’s first novel, The Monsters of Templeton, (which, to her credit, is very different from this, though both have a powerful sense of place), I put off reading this, her second, because I thought I wouldn’t be interested in the setting of a hippie...

The first two quarters of this book were beautifully rendered. The first, told from the point of view of the naive yet sensitive and often frightened five-year-old, Bit, describes his growing up in the eponymous hippie commune. Despite apparent flaws and personal trauma, it is an idyllic childhood, and this section is the novel's heart as well as Bit's sustenance as he moves through life. The second part describes, through the adolescent Bit's eyes, the decline and fall of Arcadia, pressured by