WARNING: THIS BOOK DEPICTS A SCENE OF BABY ELEPHANT DEATH.Seriously, a warning probably wouldn't have stopped me from reading it, but once the victim appeared on screen, I would've known to unfocus my eyes in time to avoid that.As someone whose favorite books/authors are my favorite books, I think very hard before recommending those books. Because if someone ends up hating the book, and it is one of my favorite books, what does that say about me, the friend, or our compatibility?I may overthink

Not quite top tier Carroll, but even slightly less great Carroll is better than most. I suspect someone asked him, politely, to try writing something more conventional and plotty because there’s an actual sense of a plot arc here. Sadly this means the book feels a bit awkward and overstuffed. One of the things I like most about Carroll is the sense that he decides on a central theme and then feels his way instinctually through that theme until the book is done. This feels less innovative and sur...

I was talking about this book with a friend, and he decided to google it to figure out what else the author had written. While looking over his shoulder, I noticed that one of the search results was from Urban Dictionary that said that "White Apples" is a slang term for the drug Ecstasy, aka MDMA, aka Molly.That fits in well with this book since the whole thing has a very "inspired by a drug trip" feel to it. I've been referring to it as "my Molly book" in conversation ever since.I really don't

My eyes are too old for the teeny tiny print in my edition of this book. I just can't keep struggling with it, and I won't rate it since I managed only a few pages. Just enough to know that it is an interesting story, and I would love to see what happens.

I really wanted to like this book. Neil Gaiman gave it a rave review, as did many others. But I gave up in disgust about 2/3 of the way through. The protagonist is, we're told, a wildly successful advertising executive who is also a world-class painter in his spare time. All women fall instantly in love with him on sight. He has never let a woman feel used, we're told, but his idea of chivalry seems to be to offer to pay for the cab after one of his numerous one-night stands. We're also told he'...

I was just talking to a friend about how I don't often post negative reviews but this one? I just have to vent. This was first posted here:http://librarianpirate.tumblr.com/pos...So in one of the first scenes, before the main character, Vincent, knows anything weird is going on, he runs into a friend, Bruno, at a restaurant. While he’s talking to his friend, he gets a phone call from his ex-wife. He excuses himself to take it and his ex-wife tells him that Bruno’s wife just called her to share t...

A Carroll book that did not work for me at all. I stopped caring in a big way, and couldn't even finish WHITE APPLES.

That was kind of a mess. I remember Carroll being a better writer; how odd. There were several passages in this novel that felt amateurish, including awkward repetitions. And really there is nothing quite so annoying as a writer constantly tugging your sleeve, saying "Look! Aren't my characters so eccentric? And likable? They are just so likable, and original. Did you see that? Let me show you again how eccentric and special." Sigh.

WHITE APPLES is one of my favorite Carroll novels; the sequel is GLASS SOUP, and both contain my favorite characters, Vincent and Isabelle. From his website:"Vincent Ettrich is in a tight spot. He has died and been brought back to life to help save his unborn son from evil and chaotic forces who want to prevent this son from becoming the savior of the universe. Sound bizarre? Welcome to the surreal and metaphysically massive novel WHITE APPLES by Jonathan Carroll.In Carroll's world, humans are k...

(possible spoilers)I'm a Jonathan Carroll fan. I am. But the more I read him the more his writing style annoys me. I'm not sure if annoy is the right word, since I still read and enjoy his books. But he likes to tell the reader things. Show don't tell, yes, the old writing adage that everyone (or every writer, anyway) knows and while I think you can certainly be a good writer when you tell your story rather than show (Garcia Marquez, Borges, most Latin American writers when you think about it) C...

White Apples is the beginning of a new trilogy from Carroll, and with new beginnings he's decided to modify his modus operandi from previous novels. To start with, gone is the first-person, unreliable male narrator; in its place is a third-person omniscient voice that is both strangly familiar and disconcerting. I hesitate to call it Carroll's true voice, because he's shown in previous novels that he can take on differing personas convincingly, and the voice is still filtered here through the im...

Jonathan Carroll has done another turn at Magic Realism here, and turned it pretty well. Here is a story of someone sent back from death to the living, to accomplish a mission they do not understand on behalf of someone who has not even been born yet.It's the sort of thing Neil Gaiman would write (indeed the book is dedicated to Neil Gaiman) and Carroll does almost as good a job as Gaiman would, but not quite.The fact that the protagonist does not have a full understanding of what he is supposed...

This review might not even be appropriate for goodreads as there are perhaps (my opinion) brighter, less "conservative" readers here, but I'm basically a lazy person, and as I wrote this review for Amazon in response to all the bad reviews of Jonathan Carroll there, I'm just transferring it to here.I think most people either love Jonathan Carroll or hate him, not much in between. I loved White Apples. Unless you're used to Jonathan Carroll's style, you might, indeed, find this book terrible as s...

The story was intriguing, the prose poetic and imaginative but the omniscient point-of-view was upsetting, the constant POV switching, sometimes from one paragraph to the next, felt like being on a rollercoaster and made me mildly nauseous.The ideas were interesting, they didn't always work for me, but they were never boring. Sometimes the writing made me catch my breath it was so magical, but too often Carroll over-thinks; too much description, too much labouring of the point rubs away the spar...

Loving every minute of this. JC never disappoints and is always over the top creative. White apples. Numen-flows.Some seriously strange cultural mishappenings:Q:There's an amazing restaurant called Peasant's Food where you sit at hand-carved wooden tables and drink hot peppery borscht. (c) How do you drink borscht? Peppery borscht is rare. And you can't drink it: it's a very clunky soup with pieces of cabbage and meat and beetroot and potatoes and sweet peppers occasionally. Drinking it would be...

This was my first Jonathan Carroll novel, but I can confidently say that it won't be my last.Vincent Ettrich is a serial womaniser, advertising executive and also recently dead. Except now he's not. He's been brought back by the love of his life for the sake of their unborn son. A son he knew nothing about. But he can't remember being dead, or why or how he's been brought back. And there are forces at work who want to keep him from ever raising that child.The scope of imagination on display here...

Vincent Ettrich has just discovered that he's been resurrected. The worst part? He has no idea how he died. And now his mistress is telling him that she's carrying his child. Thus, White Apples begins. Throw in the fate of Order versus Chaos and you have this Jonathan Carroll novel.This follows up on The Wooden Sea, though not in a directly obvious way. The themes that it carries are similar - chaos versus order, the way that the past changes who we are without us being able to change the past.

Another book that Neil Gaiman--my favorite author--loved, and that I hated. I really thought this one was going to work for me, too, as it has two of my favorite Dumb Plot Devices: Amnesia! Coming Back From the Dead! Carroll treats both of these premises in unusual ways, but nevertheless I found the narrative scattershot and incredibly unengaging. I think this may have been because Carroll changes the rules constantly, simply throwing in new fantasy elements when he needs them; I felt discombobu...

What if you know you have died, but death is extremely similar as the world we live in now? Things are just slightly off, funny looking people, talking animals, etc. That is chapter 1 of White Apples. What if your love tries to save you from death like Orpheus tried with Eurydice? That is the rest of the novel. Magical-realism at it's finest. Filled with some of the most interesting philosophies i've ever heard on life and death. An Unbelievable read by my favorite author.

Unfortunately I read a couple reviews after the fact that summed up my feelings. I picked this one up after reading a blurb by Neil Gaiman exclaiming how good this book was. Ugh. It was terrible. Uneventful. Boring. Uninteresting characters. An absurd plot. Just awful all around.