Book Review for Book Club and for the Book Girl Read-a-thon book #1: The Fortress of Solitude

Book: The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem

Source: Library

Rating: 3 stars

Review:

I read this for the Rory Gilmore Book Club and for the Book Girl Read-a-thon.

I would describe this as a modern day tragedy. And this story had buckets full of tragedy. The story deals with race, drugs, family, and struggles. This coming of age story depicted the life of main character Dylan Ebdus as he grew up in a Brooklyn neighborhood during the 70's and 80's and his life afterwards during the 90's.

Dylan was still trying to figure out life as a fifth grader and not to mention dealing with being constantly bullied when his mother left him and his father. It would be awhile before he started to receive cryptic postcards from her.

Dylan's friendship with Mingus Rude was a bit sporadic as they grew up. While they were younger their lives centered around comic books but later on it involved trying to be cool or not getting bullied. Their lives went through quite a lot of twists and turns with a good mix of tragedy piled on.

There were times I thought the writing was really good but I mostly found the book to be a mixture of good and bad story telling. The sentence structures something annoyed me and had me even having to go back and reread sentences.

This was a rather sad and dreary book sprinkled with a few moments of happiness. The Fortress of Solitude isn't exactly a book I could see myself rereading but I am glad I did read it. The story was good but I think it could have been better because after a while I found the story was losing steam and like the author really didn't know where to take this story nor how to finish it. A lot of the characters just felt like caricatures and stereotypes instead of being fully developed.

In the end, I did think this was well written but the story just wasn't as good as it should have been.