The Second Coming

By Garth Risk Hallberg
​** Publication Date 28 May 2024 **

4 stars / This review will be posted on goodreads.com today. 
This would have absolutely been a 5, but I really struggled to get through it. The writing was beautiful, challenging at times. The story took us through three generations of a family. It was a good book, but slow. So so slow. Maybe it was the heaviness of it all. The darkness of the characters and what they are hiding. The lack of timeline or mixed up one. I’m not really sure. I do know that I did enjoy this epic, but also disliked it in many ways.

Jolie is a teenager, the product of two other teenagers, now divorced and estranged. While her father, Ethan, is hiding out on Catalina Island in the Pacific Ocean, and her mother is hiding in plain view, Jolie is struggling to keep her life together. She’s recently found alcohol to be her best friend, blurring the realities of her world in New York City. Jolie is unhappy. Her father is gone, her mother virtually absent, and here she is, trying to navigate her teens, feeling all but alone.

Throughout the novel we will find out how Jolie’s parents got together. How her father ended up hiding out on an exclusive island off California. The grandparents, Albert & Eleanor, and their reluctance to accept their son-in-law, and their adoration of their granddaughter. Father Ethan’s long since passed mother & father, and his sister. The people who pass through all their lives and somehow shape Jolie’s in the process. And finally, how Jolie eventually finds herself.

As I said, this was an excruciatingly hard novel to finish. I don’t know why it felt like slogging through mud the entire time. Especially since the story was, in many ways, really quite amazing. It gets a 5 for the story, 3 for the pace. A novel that I’m happy I read, but glad I won’t be reading again.