Beautiful Children: A Novel (edit title)

• Rated 1 stars

“Character development upon character development upon character development story jumps all over plot is vague at best TO be honest I couldn't finish this one.”

• Rated 3 stars

“awesome story, interesting style of writing. ”

• Rated 3 stars

“Just picked it up...engaging,engrossing....vivid descriptions of the underbelly of life in Vegas..unexpected forays into homelessness, and runaways...very thought provoking, disturbing, some decent writing.”

• Rated 3 stars

“I loved this author's writing style but I don't know who to recommend this book to. It's terribly gritty and dark and ugly. The book jacket says it's tough and sexy, but only if masturbation and strippers and pornography are your idea of sexy. I think it would appeal to male readers far more than to women readers Most of the characters were not very likeable, and it took way to long to find out aything about the teenage boy's disappearance. Tremendous potential fo this first-time novelist, but I say Skip this first novel and hope that his next one has some characters worth caring about.”

• Rated 3 stars

“I enjoyed some of the book, but it took a while for me to get into it. So I think I only give it 3 stars because it was an up and down kind of book. ”

• Rated 4 stars

“I read the reviews on this before I was quite finished, and I think if I had read them before I started then I might not have read this book at all, but I am very glad I did. The interest for me was in the raw way the author thrusts you behind the scenes of these characters. I say "behind the scenes" rather than "in the heads" because it's true that this book is more like an act of voyeurism than anything. You are not really in these people's heads so much as just watching them. It's a lot like watching a movie, really. Only instead of good acting, we have Charles Bock, which is just as good, let me tell you. These people are real. They are so real, and none of them are real protagonists. There is no "good guy". This is real life. There is no conclusion to real life, there is no ultimate summing up. Real life is just like this. Messy.

The oddest thing occured to me after I finished this book. In "normal" society, the people in this book are the people off to the side that are passed over, ignored. In this book, they are the real people. It is the "normal" people that are glossed over, ignored. The normals exist outside the scope of this other, darker world, and here we can see very deeply into these invisible people.

Utterly fascinating.”

• Rated 0 stars

“Well written, but a horrible subject. Sad and depraved. I will never go to Las Vegas after reading this book.”

• Rated 2 stars

“One of those books that I read to the end just to find out what happened to the characters, but subject matter is very depressing and disturbing--runaways on the streets in Las Vegas....”

• Rated 4 stars

“A stunning piece of realistic fiction - Bock truly surprised me. For a first novel, Beautiful Children was a homerun. I'm typically cynical of new novels which are marketed as "New York Times Bestsellers" and large corporate bookstore centerpieces, as this book was, but I was pleasantly surprised by the honest beauty of Beautiful Children. The mastery Bock demonstrates in interweaving the stories of so many seemingly unconnected people and plots is genius; I generally give up in frustration or irritation when books bounce back and forth between story-lines and time-lines, but Bock had a way of making this disjointedness a realistic part of Las Vegas life. The third-person limited narration was genius - it left me guessing from one page to the next, from chapter to chapter and from story to story. As the novel progressed, I became more excited and terrified to discover how each of these characters relates to the others and, ultimately, to learn what the final pages had in store for these tragic deviants. I generally do not have sympathy for "hard-luck" cases, but Bock finds a Dickensian way of navigating through the everyday plights of the Las Vegas underworld, street urchin, and even the middle class, to make them all seem pitiful and simultaneously in need of championing. The underlying theme, obviously, is the very real problem of child and teenage runaways - how to stop this from happening and how to save the children, once they've gone. It was touching, inspiring, nauseating, and finally, beautiful. Had it not been for the somewhat anti-climactic ending (somewhat!), I would have given this novel 5/5. Still, it is very much worth the read. ”

• Rated 4 stars

“A really difficult read, but rather sad and beautiful too. And funny.”