I too felt, on occasion, that perhaps Mr. Johnston had appreciated the clever puns in Jessica Grant’s first novel a tad too much

Thanks for this review and the comments. I especially appreciated the pun-dignation

And if you don’t like puns, I’m fairly certain you wouldn’t like the novel.

Although I’d agree that this novel is more like his NavofNY than Colony (speaking of other Giller contenders only), I actually enjoyed it much more than NavofNY. (Colony was one of my favourites of that reading year, and I’d certainly love to re-read it.) But I do recall reading NavofNY hurriedly (it was a copy borrowed from a friend who needed it back unexpectedly) and I could easily have missed some of my favourite bits in this one (my thoughts on it are here, if you’re curious) if I’d rushed with it too.

This was the first of the longlisted books that I read for this year’s G; other than that, our reading of them hasn’t matched up yet, but I’m looking forward to other Shadow Giller responses.

I had the opposite response to Atonement. I very much enjoyed the first part of the book, interest lagged severely in frustration thru the second third, but did revive in the last bit. That is actually a common problem for me with MacEwan — he both starts and ends a story well, but tends to get self-indulgently distracted in the middle. My reactions to A World Elsewhere were so different that I don’t think I would make any comparison with the two — beyond, of course, the basic one that class conflict is present in both. With both authors, I think I would have to acknowledge that, having read so much of their work, I do pick up a new book with certain expectations — and accept responsibility that perhaps I should take some care in judging them when they have chosen to head off in a different direction.

That’s certainly the way I felt in the first half of this book — I thought Johnston was struggling to be cute and clever (I was actually starting to find comparisons with some of the awkward labels in Room, a 2010 novel that I did not like very much).

As I have indicated, the last half of the book did set up a different rhythm that I found of more interest. I started to see that some of what I had thought were weaknesses from the author were actually deliberate parts of his construction. I still don’t think it is a great novel (I’m predicting it will be somewhere Giller midlist for me) but I have some admiration for what Johnston tried to accomplish with it.