I have absolutely no interest in science fiction in any capacity. I also am deeply terrified of outer space and I once had a dream about my dad being abducted by aliens through my parents' kitchen window that left me unable to sleep without the bathroom light on for years.I found Girl in Landscape on my bookshelf. I have no memory of purchasing it, and my boyfriend says he's never seen it before. I have a ton of books cluttering my shelves right now, so I picked this up with the intention of rea...

It appears necessary that I begin my review with a true story. I was enjoying reading in the pregnant sunshine, robins flirted in the leaves behind me, a gentle breeze stirred the budding trees. I was not, however, enjoying this novel, in fact, I was sighing as I sped along. Suddenly the novel in question was targeted by an Avian Airborne Excrement attack. Now i have experienced the white drops of British sketch comedy before. This was a blast, it nearly tore the book from stunned fingers. I dec...

i found nothing unlikeable about this book.the perspective from the preteen girl is, as far as i can tell, totally infallible. i buy it completely in the sense that i never feel like it's a guy writing how he THINKS she would feel.on top of that we have classic western set in sci fi future.and itsy bitsy alien deer.the strength of his work is to write great characters and stories but set them in a sci fi setting. it's not about the setting or the world. it's about them. and that's how he transce...

3 or 4, really. I can't find the reference now but I believe John Scalzi mentioned "household deer" somewhere which sent me chasing this down. I had recently finished Motherless Brooklyn so I thought I would continue with reading Lethem. It's weird. It's suspenseful and creepy almost all the way through. The author did wrap things up nicely and left everyone in a good place but I didn't have good feelings about it. The SF aspect is almost irrelevant. Well done though. I guess it's literature.

If every book were like Jonathan Lethem's Girl in Landscape I'd probably never talk to anyone ever again. That'd not be such a bad thing, really (I mean for everybody else. I can be a right pain in the ass). I could move to a new frontier and read all day. (Start my own planet!) Everything would be the great read that makes me feel fullfilled. Longing sigh.'Landscape' I read in one sitting on a ass numbingly long flight. That I didn't notice anything else around me was amazing. That's what I wan...

I want to mention, but skip over aspects of Girl in landscape likely to be covered by other reviewers. It certainly stands out because of its genre bending of Western and Science Fiction tale. It is clearly an homage of sorts to The Searchers. It is other aspects of the book that made it very moving to read. It should not be overlooked that it is a wonderful coming-of-age story (or bildungsromane to quote the German literary term). Pella Marsh is a young woman forced to grow up far too quickly a...

Anyway, a little while back I read this book having heard good things about Jonathan Lethem. It is a post-apocalyptic novel in which largely ineffectual characters settle on a foreign planet with the primary character being 14-year-old Pella Marsh. If none of that sounded good, it is because it wasn't.Now the back of the book sold Girl in Landscape as a "genre-bending, mind-expanding tale of sexual perversity on a new frontier." Look elsewhere, brave reader, because there is little in the way of...

Upping my review to five stars. I loved this and also feel like it was pretty flawed but then I'm also not sure if the flaws were flaws or just unmet expectations I had? For example, had no real idea what the aliens looked like. Actually, that's not true at all-- they looked like Big Bird to me, so I guess I DID have an idea, but also, I don't know? That's more or less how I felt about most of this book. "What about X...wait, does X matter, isn't Y more important? BUT THEN Z..." So: loved the co...

CRITIQUE:What Makes a Man or Woman Wander?This novel was designed as a work of post-apocalyptic science fiction, although it owes much to John Ford's Western film "The Searchers".The girl's name is Pella Marsh. Shortly after the death of her mother (Caitlin), she, her father (Clement) and two younger brothers (Raymond and David) depart Earth (they had lived in Brooklyn) for a human settlement on a planet called "The Planet of the Archbuilders". Their goal was to escape an unidentified environmen...

Like a b-movie made too late. Like what's the point & where's the prose. Like don't sexualise teenage girls to pander to your male writer fantasies. Like SF? Like. Nah mate.

I like science fiction more as a setting than a genre. Too much of the writing that falls under that banner seems like the well-informed prattling of Asperger sufferers who used world-building as catharsis. Whether it's steam-punk Victorian era or a million years in the future, my deepest desire is for a story with strong character development an good pacing.Lethem gets it mostly right with Girl in Landscape, creating something akin to a Steinbeck story set in a near-future on a mostly uninhabit...

This one is a strange mix even for genre-bending genius Jonathon Lethem. "Girl in Landscape" combines a young girl's coming of age and awakening sexuality with an alien landscape and the strange relationships between human and alien beings. At times charting the landscapes of children and adults and the odd spaces in between, at others chronicling failure, loss and the inherent possibility of settling a new world. This is my favorite of his novels. It is poignant and lovely, quirky and curious,

The first third is terrific, and then the next 100 pages slow down into one of those "sexual awakening through fantasy genre trope" things, but once I adjusted to it not continuing with its initial inventiveness, I really liked this. Good ending, too.

A really peculiar novel. This is my first time reading Lethem, and I wasn't sure what to expect--though from what I can tell, his writing is very different from book to book. This books starts really strong with a family recovering from the death of their mother; there are some interesting science fiction elements, but the bigger picture had a kind vagueness that almost reminds me of a fable, contrasting with extremely interesting specific details from scene to scene. The prose is really sharp,

5/5 stars easily.

It's a terrific coming-of-age story, a terrific space Western, and a really smart reflection on human nature. But you can't quite hold it directly. There is something about it, like the sun out West, where it seems too bright to approach directly. The shattered sense of this future America sets it off on that foot; the scene at the beginning at Coney Island. We almost don't want to look but at the same time feel compelled and so those two impulses meet somewhere just off to the side of the thing...

I would call Lethem's work something like "allegorical science fiction" and maybe that is a real term. While it operates on the tropes of a scorched future earth and living on an alien planet in the ruins of a lost civilization, that is all just setting. The story is a fable of growing up while realizing that all adults around you are failing. Through the eyes (and that is really saying something in this book) of our fourteen year old protagonist, Pella Marsh, we see humanity stripped down to it...

The blurb describes this book as The Searchers meets Lolita. Hmm. Nearly.

Randomly bought this at the used book store around the corner and felt surprised how much I enjoyed this, although at times the nerdy quality of Lethem gets a bit too thick. But the imagination, genre twisting, images, spare prose, etc, is surprising

I might bump this up to four stars after mulling it over some. Hard to get a handle on this book.