Skip to main content
PBS logo
 
 

Search - The Emperor's Children

The Emperor's Children
The Emperor's Children
Author: Claire Messud
The Emperor's Children is a dazzling, masterful novel about the intersections in the lives of three friends, now on the cusp of their thirties, making their way -- and not -- in New York City. There is beautiful, sophisticated Marina Thwaite--an "It" girl finishing her first book; the daughter of Murray Thwaite, celebra...  more »
ISBN-13: 9780330451093
ISBN-10: 033045109X
Publication Date: 2006
Pages: 581
Rating:
  ?

0 stars, based on 0 rating
Publisher: Picador
Book Type: Paperback
Other Versions: Hardcover, Audio Cassette
Members Wishing: 0
Reviews: Member | Amazon | Write a Review

Top Member Book Reviews

maggiethecat avatar reviewed The Emperor's Children on + 23 more book reviews
Helpful Score: 19
Up to the fall of the World Trade Center in the last 50 or so pages, this book blew my mind. Chronicling the lives of three college friends now thirty and living in New York and struggling to come to terms with their own limitations while at the same time trying to change the world in some way, Messud's language is brilliant. Simultaneously, there exists a sense of entitlement drawn from their ivy league educations...urban revolutionists without a revolution. In the post-9/11 chapters however, it seems hurried in a wholly unsettling way. Though none of the characters are completely unlikeable, none of them are really all that likable either; their entitlement becomes distracting while their ambition is all but abandoned.
reviewed The Emperor's Children on
Helpful Score: 18
I excitedly picked up this book, looking forward to an enjoyable read about characters in the same time in life as myself. Unfortunately, I found myself continuing to read this novel and waiting: waiting for something, anything that might create some movement within the stories. I waited all the way to the last page and never found what I was looking for.
aylaanne avatar reviewed The Emperor's Children on + 10 more book reviews
Helpful Score: 11
My mother-in-law gave me this book when I told her I was spending a lot of time reading with the baby at my breast. Like a lot of novels, it had acclaims printed all over it, and three full pages of critic quotes praising it at the beginning. However, for me it failed to deliver. The beginning kind of dragged, for one. Also, the author tended to write her character's thoughts in a stream-of-consciousness format that was incredibly hard to follow. She would start a sentance with a thought, then interrupt it with a second thought, then a third, then maybe a fourth, and then finish up the first thought. It was very hard to follow. Also, her characters were, for the most part, incredibly hard to sympathize with. The main characters were in their 30s and selfish, entitled, and bratty. I wanted to smack the lot of them. I think the reason the book got such rave reviews is that it takes place in 2001, from March to November, and the climax is the September 11th attacks. I had to work hard to get myself in a pre-9/11 mindset for the beginning of the book, and when the attacks came I was as shocked as the characters. Without including the horror of September 11th, her book would have been a tremendous disappointment. With it, the story was almost redeemed. Almost. I think the melancholy nature of many of the characters through the book affected my own post-partum mood.
reviewed The Emperor's Children on + 5 more book reviews
Helpful Score: 8
This was not one of my favorite selections. I thought it rambled on in many places and found myself skimming through pages to get to the point. Just not my cup of tea.
reviewed The Emperor's Children on + 18 more book reviews
Helpful Score: 7
This book started off intresting but turned dull towards the middle. I had a hard time finishing it and it wasn't worth my time.
Read All 24 Book Reviews of "The Emperors Children"

Please Log in to Rate these Book Reviews

hazeleyes avatar reviewed The Emperor's Children on + 331 more book reviews
From The New Yorker
In this witty examination of New York's chattering classes, which opens in the spring of 2001, the despot of the title is Murray Thwaite, a famous journalist who made his name in the Vietnam era. The next generation, however, is having trouble gaining traction. Murray's daughter, Marina, unable to complete a long-overdue book on the cultural significance of children's clothing, has moved back into her parents' Upper West Side apartment and is doing a lot of yoga. Her two best friendsDanielle, a television producer, and Julius, a gay freelance criticare similarly ambitious and entitled, without being particularly driven. All three find sex the easiest way to transform themselves. Only Murray's brainy and profoundly disenfranchised nephew from upstate aggressively pursues his belief in the true and the good, but he proves to be a sort of literary terrorist, threatening to blow the family apart. The humorous intimacies of Messud's portraits do not, finally, soften the judgments behind them: If this is what's become of the liberal imagination, is it worth fighting for?
Copyright © 2006
reviewed The Emperor's Children on + 2 more book reviews
I enjoyed the characters and felt that they were richly developed. They were complex, and each had both redeeming and condeming qualities. I did not find it to ramble, like others that reviewed this book.
reviewed The Emperor's Children on + 23 more book reviews
Read almost 100 pages and just could not get into it. It is wonderfully written but I just could not connect with any of the characters. None of them interested me. It did get good reviews so it just might be me...


Genres: