Talent by Juliet Lapidos

Talent by Juliet Lapidos

Smart, unique and clever!

TALENT by JULIET LAPIDOS was an interesting, steady-paced, and quirky story that was a little structurally & mentally challenging for me to read. The blurb states that this is a “wickedly funny debut” novel that I definitely didn’t find funny at all or it went way over my head. I kind of lack the sense of understanding the dark humour here. 

JULIET LAPIDOS delivers an intriguing and well-written read here that I really wanted to fully embrace and love. I have this need to broaden my reading horizons and one of these days I am going to thoroughly “get” these types of novels. I love the challenge of reading them even if I do find them a bit grueling to read. 

I wasn’t able to really feel any emotional connection to the characters as I couldn’t connect with the academic side to the story. I missed a lot of the dark humor here with that to thoroughly immerse myself in this storyline. I just didn’t “get” it. Although I was totally entertained and engaged with the narrative, moving this story forward to keep me turning those pages. 

I feel like Talent can best be described as an academic literary thriller and is something I have not read anything like before. Like Norma mentioned I do like to challenge myself by reading more books that require me to think differently. I do think it took on a bit of a psychological feel to it as well as some of these characters were unreliable and manipulative. At times it felt a little bit like a psychological playground with the characters. The writing took on a bit of a chaotic feel to the story. It also felt a bit eccentric. Now that can be a good thing and I think here it was, however, the whole storyline was not something I was familiar with. The longest piece of work I have ever done is probably this review and I like to stick to reading fiction and not textbooks. lol

Our main character here, Anna is a grad student struggling to write her dissertation. After an encounter with a stranger, she acquires unpublished notes by a deceased talented author. Anna delves into his notebooks and things got a little chaotic for me with the different formats used to write this story. I also should have focused more on the characters and questioned their reliability instead of trying to figure out the academic dark humor of a grad student. I am not going to say anymore as to not say too much about this story.

I recommend this one to readers who like an intelligent story that explores more of academics and delves into some dark humor around Grad students.

Norma’s Stats:
Cover: Eye-catching, artistic, appealing, and distinctive. I actually quite love this cover and think it’s a great representation to storyline.
Title: Intriguing, interesting, and wish that I was talented enough to have “gotten” this one. LOL 
Writing/Prose: Well-written, entertaining, engaging and smart. 
Plot: Challenging, complex, interesting, thought-provoking, steady-paced, and entertaining. 
Ending: An ambiguous ending that I’m still not exactly sure that I interpreted correctly…..but I’m not so inclined to actually worry about not getting it though and just accepted it for what it was. 
Overall: Even though I didn’t end up loving this novel, I still appreciated and enjoyed the rugged escape that this book provided. 

Thank you so much to HBG Canada / Little, Brown Company for sending us a physical ARC of this book to read and review!

Have you read this one? Want to read it? Drop us a comment! We would love to hear from you!