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The Keep
by Jennifer Egan
Egan's creepy, gothic thriller centers on two cousins who reunite to renovate a German castle twenty years after a misguided childhood prank changed their lives.
Knopf, 256 pages
08/01/2006
$23.95
ISBN: 1400043921
Fiction
General Literature & Fiction
All reviews are classified as one of five grades: Outstanding (4 points), Favorable (3), Mixed (2), Unfavorable (1) and Terrible (0). To calculate the Metascore, we divide total points achieved by the total points possible (i.e., 4 x the number of reviews), with the resulting percentage (multiplied by 100) being the Metascore. Learn more...
Kirkus Reviews
There are a few slow spots, and the beautiful prose doesn't entirely disguise how wildly improbable the novel's events are, but the characters' emotions are so real, the author's insights so moving, that readers will be happy to be swept away. [15 Apr 2006, p.367]
Chicago Sun-Times Kevin Nance
An onion of a novel that reveals layer after layer in a way that's ingenious and engrossing...A metafictional tour de force, a probing look at the paradoxically alienating effects of global telecommunications and, best of all, a 21st century reinvention of the Gothic ghost story.
New York Observer Nan Goldberg
An intelligent, intense and remarkably intuitive work.
San Francisco Chronicle Ron Antonucci
Right when she's about to lose you in The Keep, she pulls off a writerly stunt that brings you back into the flow of her remarkable piece of work.
The New York Times Book Review Madison Smartt Bell
A work both prodigiously entertaining and profoundly moving.
The Onion A.V. Club Donna Bowman
The Keep maintains a frightening, vertiginous velocity throughout its complex warp and woof of narrators.
Atlantic Monthly Joseph O'Neill
A strange, clever, and always compelling meditation on the relationship between the imagination and the captivities (psychological, metaphysical, and even physical) of modern life.
USA Today Susan Kelly
Egan is a very good writer, insightful and often funny, so fluid that you actually have the sensation of sinking into these lives.
Village Voice Theo Schell-Lambert
The Keep updates its trip wires for a new political climate: Real pain is what hurts again, it suggests, and the bodies here protrude into the world, eminently vulnerable.
Boston Globe Merrill Kaitz
No matter how many symbols and zany subplots she juggles, and even though she drops a few, the novelist keeps the action moving and the irony biting.
Bookslut Maureen McClarnon
The Keep is easily the best book I’ve read all year. Actually, allow me one small qualification: it’s the best if one disregards the last section.
Library Journal Barbara Hoffert
An engrossing narrative told in prose that's remarkably fresh and inventive. [15 Apr 2006, p.65]
Booklist Kristine Huntley
Atmospheric and tense, this is a mesmerizing story. [1 May 2006, p.5]
The New Yorker
Egan’s clever scenario presents Danny’s mental liberation as both thrilling and dangerous - imagination is the ultimate drug, she suggests - and the novel luxuriates in Wilkie Collins-style atmospherics. But Egan spoils things with an unsavory framing device.
Washington Post Louisa Thomas
What could be a startling exercise in empathy stumbles in the contrivance of using the writing style of Ray, an inexperienced, mediocre author.
The New York Times Janet Maslin
The potential for writerly tricks is boundless, and Ms. Egan’s arresting, twisted cleverness finds many ways to surface. But despite such thoughtful provocations The Keep winds up frustratingly unresolved and falls into a moat of its own making.
Publishers Weekly
Claustrophobic paranoia, intentionally mediocre writing and a transparent gimmick dominate Egan's follow-up to "Look at Me." [3 Apr 2006, p.34]
Entertainment Weekly Nicholas Fonseca
Nothing about the cousins entices, the supposed mystery at its heart is folderol, and when Egan belatedly attempts to fuse this mess into a cohesive coda, she fails miserably.
 The average user rating for this book is 7.8 (out of 10) based on 5 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
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