I really wanted to like Pond. It came highly recommended by a great local bookseller, the cover and overall book package is lovely, and the blurbs sang the book’s praises.
“A sharp, funny, and eccentric debut …” from The New York Times book review.
“Dazzling…” from O, the Oprah Magazine.
“Innovative, beguiling…meditative…” Los Angeles Times.
I just can’t get on the praise train with this book. While there were moments of really nice writing, short passages that made me pause and re-read, ultimately I was bored by the narrator’s interior voice, felt constrained by her solitude (I know this is the author’s intention, to make the reader share an intimate and intensely confined space with the narrator, but I didn’t enjoy it and failed to meditate on the blandness of the narrator’s life in that space) and couldn’t find the dazzling or the humor.
Brief Book Reviews 