The Changeling by Victor LaValle

The Changeling by Victor LaValle was our most recent book club choice. The book is a mess, frankly. There are just so many themes!  Is it a book about postpartum depression, racism, the double standards of roles of men and women, misandry, internet trolls and the dangers of social media, or how hard parenting is?  How about ALL of these things?  It is ambitious and the sentence level writing is fine, but when I started book club by asking someone to go over the plot, the silence that overtook our normally chatty group was incredibly telling. I think the author tried to tackle too much and that led to a disaster of a book. The characters are developed in a superficial manner and the plot is a maze with lots of loose ends.

But let me tell you, this led to a really, really good discussion.  I think we were all super puzzled by this book. I mean, it starts one way and then it takes an unexpected turn, which is fine, but then it takes ANOTHER unexpected turn and then it was an action movie script. It was interesting to talk about when the book lost each of us. It was also interesting to delve more deeply into some of the themes that the book just touched on tangentially.  We had a lively debate on whether this book was feminist or misandrist and an interesting detour into the merits of To Kill a Mockingbird (1 fan, 2 people haven't read it, 1 person who despises it, and 1 person who read it in high school but doesn't remember it) and whether or not Maurice Sendak knew he would play such a pivotal role in the novel.

So I wouldn't recommend that you get this from the library, but if you're willing to try a weird book for your book club, I bet you'd have a great discussion.