I enjoyed reading this novel, it took me weeks to read it. The main characters Ethan and Jolie were interesting and their relationship was well described.

Thank you for approving me to read The Second Coming. Unfortunately I've really struggled with this book and don't feel like I'm going to be able to finish reading it. I've started it more than once but it's just too hard for me to get into. I love the idea of the story being told and the time period it's set over but it just feels a little long-winded and meandering in places and my brain just can't follow a story like that at the moment. I think the problem is with me rather than the book, I'm just not in the right headspace to read a sad and disjointed book. I may try it again in the future.

A lot of intense & hard topics are covered in this book which is great to see being brought to paper but I did find it quiet hard to read & I'm afraid it just wasnt for me.

A strained father/daughter relationship where you see a sudden interest in wanting to build on their future after a nearly fatal accident. We see a drug obsessed Father try to better himself for the sake of his daughter.

Jodie is your typical 13 year old, bottles up her emotions and hides her true feelings. It was difficult to read about her depression and anger. Ethan is a drug addict and wants to try and reflect on how he got to where he is and what he can do to change his future.

I found the book a relatively difficult read but I applaud the authors capability to write about very taboo and difficult topics.

Found this book to be very hard going. I didn’t like the writing style and found it laborious. I wanted to love this book as the themes of suicide and addiction are important to me. However, I just did not get on with the book .

Thanks to NetGalley and the Publishers, Granta Books, for this ARC

An Extraordinary book
The novel tells the story of an American family principally Jolie and her father Ethan. It is told in a mixture of flashbacks and real time chapters .the story jumps around in time gradually filling us in with their backgrounds. And ultimately focusing on the underlying reasons for their addictions. The daughter becomes hooked on alcohol which she uses to numb the feelings associated with her splintering family, . At the start of this book she is rescued after falling in front of a subway train. It’s unclear whether or not this was a suicide attempt or cry for help what is clear however is that she is drunk when it happens Her father has a long history of drug and alcohol addiction starting in his own youth. The novel looks at the power of addiction and the effect on the addict’s close family and friends .
Whereas the themes in this novel are potentially traumatic and could be triggering for some readers I felt that the author manages to address these issues with great sensitivity and skill. At no stage did I feel I was being preached to which sometimes happens when such powerful emotions and epic themes are covered.The author has a natural understanding of the psychology of addiction .
There is a scene in the novel where the character suffers from a bad trip whilst taking drugs. The way the author writes the scene really messes with the reader’s head .it it that makes you feel like you’re having a bad trip yourself
The author is best known for his City on fire, which I read and enjoyed soon after it was published in 2015. I personally enjoyed this book more than that one.

I didn’t really understand the prologue which has put me off the book right from the start, but I did quite like the authors previous novel city on Fire so I persevered . I was very glad that I did passive as as soon as the first chapter started. I was immediately enthralled by the novel. When I went back and reread the prologue, it made much more sense.
He also has the skill to describe individual characteristics of his characters very precisely and distinctly. Likewise he is able to make the characters develop during the story and their interactions seem entirely real.
I loved the way that the novel weaved around from person to person and time to time. I sometimes struggle with novels of this sort knowing what each section is focusing on but apart from in the prologue, it was always clear to me who I was reading about and what timeframe.

This is a very American novel the author has a distinctive writing style reminiscent of Fleishman’s in Trouble by Taft Brodesser-Akner or A Little Life by hannana Yamagihara . I would recommend the novel to those who enjoy a primarily character based deeply emotional novel.

I read a copy of the novel on NetGalley UK. The book was published in the UK on the 4th of July 2024 by Granta publications
This review will appear on NetGalley UK Goodreads and my book blog bionic SarahS books.WordPress.com. It will also appear on Amazon UK.

Not the book for me. I don’t mind having to work hard at a novel if I am getting something back for my work. That didn’t happen for me. Too much free association without proper punctuation, pages and pages of the stuff. A someone else said it tested one’s patience.

Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC.

Set in America in the late twentieth and early twenty first centuries, this book is essentially a story of a father and a daughter, their individual challenges and the mental health issues that unite them. It's a bit difficult to say more about the plot without just telling the story but I'm sure there are good summaries elsewhere.

In terms of my review, let me start with the good. It's a really interesting premise and it covers some very difficult topics with honesty and sensitivity. The characters are well drawn, even some of the minor ones. And the end is fairly satisfying.

But...it is a LONG book! I don't normally shy away from long books but this felt unnecessarily so. The descriptions were a bit convoluted with words that I sometimes had to look up (and I read quite a lot!). There were chapters, particularly a couple at the end, that felt surplus to requirements or needed further development. And finally, because it's so long, so detailed, and the time period jumps about a lot, if you don't read it quite quickly, you may forget some of the previous sections (I know I did anyway!). I apologise to the author as I'm sure they would've put their heart and soul into it but I just felt like reading this book was a bit of a slog and that's not what reading should be.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read this book.

At the heart of this long, very long, sprawling epic is the story of a family longing, but somehow unable, to connect. Teenage Jolie, her estranged father Ethan and his ex-wife Sarah, the woman he once feel so deeply in love with but whom he alienated by his behaviour. He’s been in Jolie’s life only as an absence but when he hears that she’s had a near-miss accident dropping her phone onto the subway tracks in New York he feels impelled to come back into her life. Easier said than done. Discursive, meandering, rambling and so very wordy, going back and forth in time and place, it’s an ambitious novel, there’s nevertheless much to admire here, I felt. The characters are complex, their motivations relatable and their failures equally so. Ethan’s addictive behaviour is insightfully portrayed, and his inability to escape from his self-destructive behaviour actually quite moving – even if frustrating for the reader. Jolie’s struggle to come to terms with their dysfunctional relationship is also very moving. But overall, this would have benefited from a ruthless edit. There’s just too much of it. I did stay with it, reading a bit at a time, and I was engaged by the narrative and the people, but I admit to a huge sigh of relief when I’d finished.

I'm sorry I didn't like this book more but I found it hard to get into. Thanks to the author, publisher and NetGalley for the ARC

The Second Coming is set primarily around 2011, but with leaps in time that take it 2022, 2001 and occasionally elsewhere. It focuses on two primary characters - Jolie Aspern, a precocious and troubled 13-year-old living in New York with her mother Sarah, and her estranged father Ethan, an ex-convict and recovering addict. It begins compellingly, with Jolie finding herself hospitalised following a narrow escape on Subway tracks, and Ethan receiving a call from Sarah that convinces him that he has something to offer her, and returns to New York to seek her out.

It’s clear from early on that Ethan’s ‘gift’ to Jolie is his life story, an explanation of the errors of his ways that (in his mind at least) will offer her empathy into both the circumstances that can lead to deep dissatisfaction with life, and through that perhaps a pathway to avoid his own mistakes. It’s also fairly transparently an attempt to absolve himself of some of the blame for the impact his actions (and subsequent absence) have had on the mental state of his daughter.

Through the novel’s time leaps we find ourselves rubbing up against key moments in history. From the 2022 vantage point we see the lingering world of the Covid Pandemic, referenced regularly in these snippets but never seemingly to any great purpose - though it was presumably in Hallberg’s mind when choosing Yeats’ Spanish Flu-influenced poem ‘The Second Coming’ as inspiration for the titling. There are bits and pieces of 90s and early 2000s history deployed elsewhere, with 9/11 most impressively evoked.

If anything, that last point made me wish the book had spent more time in 2001 than 2011. City on Fire, for all its flaws, masterfully evoked a sense of time and place with its depiction of the unimaginably different New York of blackouts, looting and terror in the 1970s. The Second Coming struggles to have any similar impact in its primary parts. Hallberg is, here, far more interested in recreating Ethan’s sleepy Maryland hometown, which is fine but has much less universal appeal, at least to this UK-based reader’s eyes. The 9/11 section, if brief and not wholly original (how could it be?), offers a brief glimpse of Hallberg’s knack for vividly capturing that city at its strangest moments, and I for one would have loved more.

Elsewhere there are other strong positives. There are memorable scenes that stick in the mind, notably one atop the Brooklyn Bridge, and its characters, while not likeable (and occasionally in Jolie’s case not especially plausible) are captivating in their oddness. Beyond those couple of redeeming features, though, I have to admit that I struggled fairly massively with this one.

The primary bugbear is the language. Hallberg is a publicly declared fan of the likes of DeLillo (me too!) and David Foster Wallace (who I’m too lazy to have read!) and it shows in the ambition of his writing but not always in the delivery. What he is strong on: conveying an atmosphere through writing; the imitation of the rhythms of music (especially jazz-influenced music) through prose; sketching out vivid scenes and characters. What he’s less strong on: writing prose that is actually a pleasure to read; plot; storytelling. I’ve read reviews describing this book as ‘exhausting’ and ‘headache-inducing’ and as I did so I excitedly showed them to my partner, shouting ‘yes! Look! THIS is the book I’ve been suffering through for the last 2 weeks!’

If its endless sentences that go nowhere are its biggest pain point, they certainly aren’t its only issue. From its promising origins, its ‘plot’ covers a lot of ground in terms of time and space, but its destination seems barely any further advanced than its origin. Trainwreck absent dad attempts to bond with traumatised daughter; realises he was better off out of her way in the first place. Duh. It’s also a book that makes a big play of threading musical references through its many pages, right down to its final third being an effective mix-tape with sections titled with track names (some very familiar, some cool deep cuts, some too elusive for this semi-nerd even). This is all very nice, but it does very little for the reader. The songs exist primarily in the characters’ heads, offering no insight into their situation beyond the occasional reference that you catch but is way too on-the-nose anyway. Its prose, as mentioned, is musical, but more of an elaborate free-jazz puzzle than an enjoyably melodious symphony.

It's a book I didn’t entirely hate but I’m definitely glad to have done with. I’m not sure what the wider world will make of it. But with critics already divided by Hallberg’s far superior debut, it’s hard to imagine that he’s made life easier for himself with this meandering 600-page follow-up.

(5/10)

A hard-going read. This book wasn't for me, I'm afraid. At times it was like wading through James Joyce's Ulysses. It started off ok, with recovering alcoholic Ethan's ex-wife phoning to tell him that their daughter Jolie had had an accident. Gradually we hear about his life and how he came to be so messed up. I gave up about three-quarters of the way through as I couldn't make sense of it due to the lack of punctuation.

I'm very sorry, but this book is not for me. I found it too slow and could not relate to it. However, I wish you success with it and thank you to NetGalley.

My sincere apologies to Garth Risk Hallberg and to Granta Publications. I read and loved City On Fire so I was excited when my NetGalley request for The Second Coming was approved and I was looking forward to reading the book. And I did read half of it (which in terms of length would be all of it for a more reasonable length book). The trouble is that I really didn't care for the characters and the writing style turned me off. So, it is with some sadness that I have to report that I gave up at the halfway point - and I know that's the right decision for me because I don't feel any regret that I will never know how things work out for Ethan or Jolie.

My thanks to Granta for approving my request. As they always say in these reviews, the ARC is given in return for an honest review and this is my honest opinion of the book from my perspective. I hope lots of other people love it, but it is not for me.

The literary equivalent of a syncopated jazz ensemble; written with confusing depth and timing I was unable to relate to. One of those books I felt as though I was missing something, lots of ramblings without speech punctuation.

A slow moving story about the history and relationship between Jolie and her father Ethan.
I found this story both sad and disturbing.
Thank you to NetGalley and Granta Publications for my e-copy in exchange for an honest review.