Nope. Not for me.

* Please be warned, this book is probably a masterpiece of some kind, but I really just didn’t like it and I am incredibly annoyed that I spent so much time slogging through it. That annoyance may have coloured my review a little bit. Or a lot. *

I am so sure that The Goldfinch: A Novel says amazing and incredibly deep things about art, delinquency, addictions, etc., but I was far too bored to pick up on them. I wanted so badly to like this book. I kept wanting it to get more interesting and every time I thought that it would, it got even further off track. There is a good story in here, but more than 75% of the text focused on tangents and whole chapters were devoted to things that could have been summed up or not even mentioned at all. I kept hoping this would be more like Ann Pratchett’s work, where it takes me awhile to really fall in love with the story, but I eventually walk out feeling challenged and entertained. Both State of Wonder and Bel Canto were challenging for me in the beginning, but I was eventually pulled into the characters, the scenery, and Pratchett’s unparalleled ability to use storytelling to make commentary about important cultural issues. However, I just couldn’t grab onto anything in the Goldfinch hard enough to carry me through the parts that I found slow and uninteresting. More…