| View Larger Image | A Taxonomy of Barnacles: A Novel | Paperbackby Galt Niederhoffer (Author)
| List Price: | $14.00 | | Price: | $11.90 | | You Save: | $2.10 (15%) | | | Available: | Usually ships in 24 hours |
| | Binding: | Paperback | | Publisher: | Picador | | Page Count: | 384 Pages | | Publication Date: | December 12, 2006 | | Sales Rank: | 446,926th |
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EDITORIAL REVIEWS |
Product Description
Set in the baronial Upper East Side apartment of Barry Barnacle, among giant aquariums, a sprawling shell collection, and a jungle room with a three-toed sloth and a macaque, this is the story of the six Barnacle daughters, aged ten to twenty-nine. As the story begins, one daughter has returned home secretly pregnant, and she and her sister are sneaking out at night to meet the Finch twins in the apartment downstairs, while Barry, the patriarch, has devised a challenge for his daughters: whoever can secure the future of the Barnacle line within the week will inherit his whole fortune.A love story, a family chronicle, and a portrait of a city, A Taxonomy of Barnacles is "a confident and witty debut that brings to mind an eccentric combination of The Virgin Suicides and Little Women" (Kirkus Reviews). |
CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 3.0 based on 33 reviews)
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1 star is almost too many... by KJo (San Diego)  1 Stars
June 10, 2009
I've given up after about 100 pages. The only reason I made it that far was it was the only book I took with me on a weekend trip! I had nothing else to do on the plane and kept picking it up, reading another few pages until I couldn't stand it anymore, putting it down to stare at the seat in front of me, and then repeating the process out of boredom. I agree with other reviewers that it has a lot in common with Royal Tenenbaums, which is a movie that I love. Reading about insanely quirky, rich, self-absorbed characters just isn't as amusing. The writing was mostly bad, the little literary references and tricks were too obvious, the characters were unlikeable, and it all seemed very self-indulgent.
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yuck by N. Schrier (New York, NY) 1 Stars
March 03, 2008
couldnt even get through the first 30 pages. i found the author's style of writing to be really hard to follow.
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A VERY mixed blessing by Lorrie Stuart (New York, New York USA)  3 Stars
December 29, 2007
I really wanted to like this book. It is -- in many respects -- charming and witty, and it creates an absolutely lovely picture of New York, with gorgeous evocations of Central Park and the Upper East Side. But, in the end, it is very difficult to read. First, there is the slightly silly device of the primary characters' names, all of which begin with a "B". This would work if all of them were all equally delineated. Unfortunately, not the case. The book theoretically focuses on the six daughers of the Barnacle family -- Bell, Bridget, Betina, Belinda, Beryl, and Beth. But only the first three have any real part in the story, and -- as a result -- reading about the latter three becomes a task rather than a pleasure: one never knows which is which, or how to unravel their stories and their place in the narrative. Second, the plot tends to jump around alarmingly, with situations introduced and then abandoned. Ms. Niederhoffer is obviously talented, but in her next novel (hopefully there will be one) she needs to discipline herself, drop the cutesiness, and concentrate instead on her finely-tuned descriptive skills.
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Zero stars by UES 1 Stars
March 29, 2007
"A Taxonomy of Barnacles," about six sisters --whose names all start with a "B"-- seemed like a quirky, different novel, so I picked it up at the bookstore without having heard or read anything about it. Well, talk about hate at first page. Niederhoffer's writing is terrible, her characters are pretentious and annoying, and the whole thing reads like the bad effort of a privileged high-school student who's been told she's so bright and precocious.
I don't know whose daughter/wife/friend Galt Niederhoffer is, but I am certain this book got published because of the author's contacts, not her talent, since unfortunately she has none.
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Some lively characters overwhelmed by the author's mistakes by Richard L. Goldfarb (Seattle, WA United States)  2 Stars
March 03, 2007
"A Taxonomy of Barnacles" is supposedly a novel about nature versus nurture, taking its name from an early work of Darwin, and posing, in the background, the question of why Darwin, having developed his theory of natural selection in a study of barnacles, waited many years to publish it, and then focused instead on finches.
Thus, we have the contrast between the Barnacle family, a wealthy Jewish family whose patriarch made his money in pantyhose, and the Finch family, their WASPish neighbors who include a pair of identical twins. The book's introduction is well-written and intriguing, but from the start of the first actual chapter the book seems to have lost its way. Everyone in the Barnacle family has a first name starting with B, except for adopted Latrell, and they are hard to keep track of. Bell and Bridget and youngest Benita are pretty distinct, while the other three often go unmentioned for many pages. Bits and pieces are worthwhile, but the time scale is hard to follow, with some things seeming to go on forever while the book turns out to take place within a single week.
The supposed engine of the plot is a King Lear like promise by father Barry Barnacle to leave his fortune to the daughter who immortalizes the family name. Motifs of the importance of the right proposal (which I assume is the point other reviewers refer to as a shout out to Jane Austen), the similarities and differences between twins and siblings, infidelity, deception and identity switching fill the book.
Unfortunately, what does not fill the book is any sense of consistency.
The author can't make up her mind as to how identical the Finch twins actually are, just like she can't make up her mind as to whether Bella, the mother, breaks her leg (a plot point that just lies there) or it is merely a sprain. Within two paragraphs, Latrell has two different favorite places to hide (many of which are pretty hard to imagine actually working in 2006 in New York, such as hanging at the Guggenheim amongst the art after hours; does she think there are no motion detectors or cameras?). Yankee players have made up names; David Wells pitches for the Red Sox. Her basic understanding of baseball, despite the fact that it is mentioned over and over again, seems at about the level of the average American's understanding of English County Cricket. New Yorkers are not divided between fans of the Yankees and Red Sox, they are divided between fans of the Yankees and Mets. A grand slam in the bottom of the ninth when the team is four runs behind ties the game; it is not over.
Perhaps the strangest bit, though, is at the very beginning. Bridget's erstwhile boyfriend Trot, on whom she has been cheating in her heart with Billy Finch, is chided by her for having failed to bring cake to the family's Seder. He, not Jewish, failed to do so for the obvious reason that no one should bring cake to a ceremony where only unleavened bread is to be consumed.
I did laugh out loud at her making fun of my own surname on page 166. And at a few other points, which is why it rates two stars, not one. Benita is kind of fun and Beryl is rather sweet. Others have compared it to the Royal Tenenbaums (which I hated), but I think the sense of unreality and privilege comes more from Francis Ford Coppola's "Life Without Zoe", his generally unsuccessful contribution to "New York Stories". It too is a fantasy about privileged people that seems to assume that we should care about them, without going to the effort to provide us a reason why we should care.
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