It's been a couple years since I read this, but this book still brings back memories every time I see it, and I felt it was time to come back and give it a proper review.Since I was 3 years old, my family has owned a cottage on Lake Erie, in a resort community near Cedar Point. We stay there every summer for at least one full week, plus a dozen weekends, and are always joined by a bounty of friends and family. It has always been a place I will treasure, and holds many fond memories. Of all the b...

Spectacular"Sag Harbor"is a fantastic coming of age story about life at the beach during the summer. It is incredibly well written with characters that are precise to the plot. Although I have never been to Sag Harbor or any Long Island beach, this was a story I related to because I went to the Jersey shore during the summer. And many other activities presented in this book, I also experienced.Super book! I highly recommend!

This book was hysterical. A little drawn out at times but so many funny parts!

This was the perfect book to read in late summer, as well as a nice introduction** to the writing of Colson Whitehead. It’s more like a 4.5 star book, but I’m rounding up because the writing is so good and the author captures this era so effectively. I’m definitely going to read more by him.It’s the summer of 1985 and 15-year-old Benji is, as usual, at his family’s place on the eponymous Sag Harbor, a small village in the Hamptons populated during the season by upper-middle class, professional A...

The first time I read this book shortly after publication in 2009 I didn’t like anything about it. I didn’t understand Whitehead’s air of casual privilege. I reread it at the end of 2017 because a review by Brandon Harris in the New York Review of Books (Dec 7, 2017) about James McBride’s new collection of short stories, Five-Carat Soul, mentions Sag Harbor as “ravishing.” What did I miss?The short answer is that I missed everything. But without going back to interrogate that 9-year-ago self, I...

Colson Whitehead is one shit-describin' motherfucker.

Remember that guy from high school? You know the one: smart as a whip, and funny too. Handsome, nice smile. Maybe he was on the basketball team or something. Let's call him Mike. Mike's teachers used to say he was "going places." And how could he not be? He was enrolled in all the right AP classes, and he was entirely agreeable. Always knew exactly the right thing to say, that Mike. He wasn't really sure what he wanted to do with his life, but that was okay. It's okay not to know in the beginnin...

My real rating is 4,5 stars. Excellent read! The only thing that prevents me from giving this book 5 stars is the ending. However, this book has so much going for it and I strongly recommend it. Click the link to watch the live discussion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wtLe...

Every once in a while there’s absolutely no need for me to write a review because I sneak a peek at what others’ thought and find my exact reaction has already been posted . . . . . I snatched this up when it appeared on my library’s recommendation feature – mainly due to the fact that I am anxiously awaiting the release of Harlem Shuffle and have already given up the dream of obtaining an early copy since NetGalley said “no thank you, ma’am, your review ratio is embarrassing.” Whitehead is

A sentimental tale of growing up through the lens of a set of black middle-class teenagers at liberty for their summers on Long Island. There is a timeless quality and sense of innocence in this exploration of juvenile adventure and search for identity. The relatively segregated community of wealthy professionals is free from the racism and pressures to succeed they face in their private schools in New York City. Benji and his brother are trusted to fend for themselves during the weekdays when t...

I'm trying really hard to fall in love with Whitehead's writing, but it's not quite working and I'm not sure why. Sag harbor started off strong for me and I was looking forward to moving through the story, but somewhere along the way I wandered away from truly enjoying it. I'm not sure why his writing is flat for me. It's hard when I know in my head that I should be enjoying a story that I assumed I would connect with, but it's just didn't happen. I didn't stay invested in the story past the hal...

Brought this to the beach and then promptly left it halfway finished and ignored it for a month. Sorry, book.My reread of this made me realize that my memory of it was really vague! While I remembered a lot about the setting, I had forgotten all of its Colson-Whitehead-ness. Which is probably because I was reading so much Whitehead at the time that it had become normal to me. I forgot how talky it is, the way the narrator goes on and on, the way he turns circles into these long digressions that

Colson Whitehead is a wonderful writer. Although I wasn't a Sag Harbor summer kid myself, the author and I are about the same age so much of his reminiscing about his experiences as a 15 year old stirred similar memories I possess. Sag Harbor is a work of fiction, not a memoir, but it reads as much like the latter than as a novel, and no doubt it was largely inspired by the author's youthful days. Not a whole lot happens in Sag Harbor, basically a group of teenagers kill the abundance of time th...

I'm glad I read this book in the dead of winter - it is so evocative of the atmosphere of a little beach town and of a kid's experience of coming of age during the long, restless and wondrous days of summer. Though the novel focuses primarily on Benji's coming of age in an upper middle class African American community, so many of his experiences and the themes in the book cross race lines, and Whitehead makes Benji's experiences feel almost universal. This novel presents the complex and delicate...

I was going to give this book 3 stars because there are parts I liked and parts that were only ok, so it seemed to average out to 3 stars. But in the last 10 pages there is a reflection on growing up that was so well done that it pulled me to 4 stars. Overall, this is good read about being a teenager, trying to find your place in the world and understanding how things work. This theme was made more compelling by the narrator's specific circumstances, i.e. as a middle class African American spend...

This coming-of-age novel takes place in 1985. Last summer I read another, Black Swan Green by David Mitchell, which also takes place in the 80s. Now that I think of it, I read another the summer before: How to Build a Girl by Caitlin Moran. There are similarities between them but differences that set each apart. Have writers who were teens in the 90s and 2000s written any coming-of-age novels? I'm curious if the same similarities of style, obsessions, nostalgia, and pop culture references bind t...

In parts this is well written, but somewhere around the middle I was bored. And, I stayed bored until about twenty five pages from the end. When the writing was good, it was worth reading, but I didn't find his story overly compelling.

Dag... I really liked this hyperrealistic hybrid between autobiography and fiction (from its internal consistency and from the author's Acknowledgements, it seems likely that much of the background and many of the events were drawn from his own growing up). It begins at the intersection of two alien worlds—alien to me, anyway. The first: growing up black in America. The second: growing up wealthy—or affluent, well-to-do, at worst upper middle-class... definitions differ, but families who live in...

This book is… unexpected. When I began it, I thought it was a traditional coming of age story; there would be a challenge, a test of some sort, that the main character would have to get through in order to have grown into a new person by the end of the summer. But that’s not what this book is. It is simply a novel that recounts the summer of a teenage boy. It’s warm, sweet, at times a little sad but mostly as carefree as summer nights are.Of course it is about Sag Harbor, the Hamptons for upper-...

I'd be the first acknowledge that Colson Whitehead's style is a tough sell for most readers. He's got a detatched, wordy aloofness, and a meandering stream-of-conscious quality that might alienate some, bore others. I contend, though, he's certainly worth reading if you're like me and appreciate authors in love with the English language. He completely wowed me with 2011's Zombie-story-for-people-that-don't-like-zombie-stories: Zone One. Mr. Whitehead's meandering iciness contributed wonderfully