Review: Party by Tom Leveen

Mar 25, 2010 by shanyn

Title: Party
Author: Tom Leveen
Publisher: Random House
Publication Date: April 27, 2010

Book Summary:
It’s Saturday night in Santa Barbara and school is done for the year. Everyone is headed to the same party. Or at least it seems that way. The place is packed. The beer is flowing. Simple, right? But for 11 different people the motives are way more complicated. As each character takes a turn and tells his or her story, the eleven individuals intersect, and reconnect, collide, and combine in ways that none of them ever saw coming.

Review:
This book reminded me a little of the movie Crash when I read the synopsis (lots of different lives coming together in the end), so I was excited to read it because I like when an author is clever about how characters are related.

Each chapter is written by one person in the story – we never get to revisit a character unless someone in a later chapter talks about them. For the most part this was okay, because I didn’t particularly care to hear what some of the people were thinking about. In other instances, though, the stories went much deeper and a lot was revealed the later we got into the book, making me want to know what the narrators of chapters one and two were thinking, now that so many other things had happened.

There was also a character that I didn’t like, at all. Even in the end. She was the main person that kind of carried the plot through from beginning to end because of her decision to break up with her boyfriend, so that probably made me like the book a little less.

Overall, the book was enjoyable (I never considered not reading it anymore), just not as clever as I was hoping it would be.

1 Comment

nomadreader

March 25, 2010

The title and cover did not do anything for me, but I love the idea of having a different character narrate each chapter. I'm looking forward to reading this book still, but it's nice to know the premise doesn't pack quite enough punch.