Pasadena

This book, despite its length is a fairly quick read with accessible prose. I picked up this book because I live not far from where some of the novel takes place. Overall, I found the book enjoyable. It is a tragedy on a grand scale. The book does suffer in its middle stretch from a fairly plodding pace. I commend the author for his research which reflects in his enlightening historical details.

"Pasadena" is a splendid novel which affirms David Ebershoff's talent for writing great fiction. It is a far different novel than his critically acclaimed - and popular - literary debut "The Danish Girl"; one still worth the time of a devout reader of contemporary fiction. Ebershoff's latest novel is a sprawling epic which covers almost the first half of the 20th Century, focusing on the shattered lives of Linda Stamp, her father Dieter, and the two men she falls in love with; the mysterious orphan Bruder and the equally enigmatic Captain Willis Poore. Ebershoff tells a compelling yarn about Pasadena's rapid rise from a frontier haven to wealthy Easterners to a surburban city soon to be engulfed by Los Angeles, as seen through the eyes of these four protagonists. And yet, as splendid as Ebershoff's writing is, it did not quite captivate me as much as China Mieville's "The Scar" (Although Mieville's novel is fantasy, it too also tells a compelling saga about dysfunctional characters.). Still I am sufficiently impressed with Ebershoff's latest tale to grant it five stars; it is among the most compelling works of contemporary mainstream fiction I've come across.

This wonderfully crafted story keeps you interested from the first page until the last. The characters are fascinating and the history of Pasadena was interesting and almost like an extra character. A great read!

David Ebershoff has entered the arena of current writers able to carry off The Big Story, his comrades in this arena being Richard Russo, Jocye Carol Oates, Annie Proulx, Cormac McCarthy among others. PASADENA: A Novel is epic in length at 500 pages and for those readers who find books of this length daunting, all fear of ennui can be put aside. Ebershoff knows how to spin a tale and develop branches, twigs and fruit on his basic trunk of an idea that maintain the reader's interest in carefully following the unfolding of this saga of California from the turn of the century to mid 20th century. Wisely he incorporates all the ethnic groups, the miscegenation, the influx of the Eastern US wealthy into a land of the pioneer spirit and in doing so he successfully defines what exactly makes his chosen locale of Pasadena unique. The story is about people - men and women who strive for independence and social acceptance simutaneously, who drive their lives through pledges secretly made and just as secretly dismantled, who search for love for all right reasons but settle for less than their ideals, whose lives intertwine with the ever changing permutations of individuality only to come full circle to their own altered origins.The characters Ebershoff creates are wholly three dimensional and do not stray beyond the boundaries of credibilty. Love, longing, lust, lying, and the building and destroying of dreams are on every page. Bruder, an orphan from an unknown family is seen as trash as a child in Pasadena where the Top 100 percenters or accepted Society members determine the lives of too many people, but becomes the stalwart force that carries this tale of war, of greed, of the 'gold in California' spirit, and ultimately the arrival of the foundations of the freeways and housing developments that have transformed current day Pasadena from its origins as a winter haven for the East Coast wealthy who basked in the glory of the lush landscape of orange groves and the Sierra Madre mountains. He is a giant of a man, but then he walks among equal giants in the personas of Linda Stamp, her father Dieter, her ultimate husband Willis Poore, and the myriad supporting cast of characters who weave in and out of this unfolding mystery with unflagging stealth. If the critical eye finds that the author at times pushes the descriptive language of the genus/species flora/fauna of his locales (he seems especially bent on informing us of the beginnings of many extant Pasadena families, businesses, and buildings) to the point of excess, then at the same time that eye must admit that few writers are so well researched in all the details that make us secure in the knowledge that this story could be a true tale.Ebershoff is a full-fledged novelist with the publication of this tome. He is one elegant writer! The promises made in his earlier 'The Danish Girl' and in the tightly detailed 'The Rose City' are not only kept but surpassed. Here is a man who can spread his w