What do You think about The Wooden Sea (2002)?
This is one of the rare books that causes you to pause and ask yourself "What am I reading?" Not once, not twice, but a minimum of at least three times. The Wooden Sea is not a book for everyone; not even a book for most people.Carroll's writing is utterly shameless. He writes for himself entirely, and what comes out is a set of characters incredibly well-defined. His setting, his characters, the surrealistic nature of his plot and universe itself all come off as incredibly reasonable. He bumps the cliché and then promptly subverts it - he nears a piece where a lesser writer would falter, and hurdles it with ease.Jonathan Carroll, while not for everyone, seems to be for some people perfectly. I feel quite lucky to be among that crowd.
—Hilary
What a strange, lovely ride. The humor in the narration captured me from the starting line, and things did not stop or slow down at all from there. An intricate plot but Carroll makes it readable and easy enough to follow, timejumps and all. I bought this book for $3 at HPB a few years ago and let it idle on my shelf for a while, never quite sure if I wanted to dip my toes into a slice of a genre that is so historically hit or miss for me. Now that I've zoomed through the novel in a few days' time, I'm glad I dipped.Relatable characters, poignant suffering, humor that made me chuckle out loud several times, warm fuzzies executed without excess cheese, and a wildly original concept as a whole. If I had to offer any criticism it would be that the ending felt both slightly spoonfed and kind of abrupt. Yet I understand why the message was spelled out so thoroughly, as some readers may not pick up on it throughout the book, so it didn't really bother me. Spoonfed it was, but Dickensian it was not. A few sentences of spelling out and then it moved on. I'm okay with that. The point is: I thoroughly enjoyed this book and will be reading more of Carroll's work.To finish, here's one of my favorite quotes from the book that - no lie or hyperbole - brought some sting to my eyes. There's a wealth of simple lines that cut straight to the feels throughout the novel, but this one got me especially:"I'm frightened that one day I'm going to lose all this and I won't have loved it enough. Remember that - love this all the time."Yowza. My feels.
—Alli
The story starts off with a one-eyed, three-legged dog expiring like an old wounded warrior, and then things get stranger and stranger. “The Wooden Sea” is a novel I picked up thanks to a recommendation in the “2003 Nebula Awards Showcase” as an example of the direction the fantasy genre was heading. And “fantasy” here means fantastical, not medieval. I think if I had to give just one label to this book, it would be “surreal.” The book starts off odd, then gets strange, and then gets truly weird. The lead character, a police chief in a small town, was extremely well rendered, and shows some real growth both prior to the timeline of the novel and within the novel as well. The novel does suffer from something I think a lot of modern surreal novels suffer from, though... Things are somewhat explained by the end, and the explanation seems contrived and a bit too tidy. Somehow, the magic of the bizarre needs to be left as mysterious magic, and when it gets explained, it’s somewhat of a let-down. (I got this same feeling from Stephen King’s recent behemoth, “The Dome,” but Carroll’s reasoning here is significantly better than King’s was.)But if you like strange, give this one a shot!4 of 5 stars.
—Steven Cole
