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Beautiful Children: A Novel | 
 enlarge | Author: Charles Bock
Publisher: Random House
Category: Book
List Price: $25.00
Buy Used: $4.92
You Save: $20.08 (80%)
New (40) Used (40) Collectible (8) from $4.92
Avg. Customer Rating:  40 reviews
Sales Rank: 129620
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 432
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.5
Dimensions (in): 9.2 x 6.4 x 1.7
ISBN: 1400066506
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.6
EAN: 9781400066506
ASIN: 1400066506
Publication Date: January 22, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: Expedited shipping available
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: This book is a hardcover with a clean dust jacket and in like new condition. The book has clean pages and looks fine.
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Product Description
One Saturday night in Las Vegas, twelve-year-old Newell Ewing goes out with a friend and doesn’t come home. In the aftermath of his disappearance, his mother, Lorraine, makes daily pilgrimages to her son’s room and tortures herself with memories. Equally distraught, the boy’s father, Lincoln, finds himself wanting to comfort his wife even as he yearns for solace, a loving touch, any kind of intimacy.
As the Ewings navigate the mystery of what’s become of their son, the circumstances surrounding Newell’s vanishing and other events on that same night reverberate through the lives of seemingly disconnected strangers: a comic book illustrator in town for a weekend of debauchery; a painfully shy and possibly disturbed young artist; a stripper who imagines moments from her life as if they were movie scenes; a bubbly teenage wiccan anarchist; a dangerous and scheming gutter punk; a band of misfit runaways. The people of Beautiful Children are “urban nomads,” each with a past to hide and a pain to nurture, every one of them searching for salvation and barreling toward destruction, weaving their way through a neon underworld of sex, drugs, and the spinning wheels of chance.
In this masterly debut novel, Charles Bock mixes incandescent prose with devious humor to capture Las Vegas with unprecedented scope and nuance and to provide a glimpse into a microcosm of modern America. Beautiful Children is an odyssey of heartache and redemption–heralding the arrival of a major new writer.
Advance praise for Beautiful Children
“Charles Bock has delivered an anxious, angry, honest first novel filled with compassion and clarity. Beautiful Children is fast, violent, sexy and–like a potentially dangerous ride–it could crash at any moment but never does. The language has a rhythm wholly its own–at moments it is stunning, near genius. This book is big and wild–it is as though Bock saved up everything for this moment. A major new talent.”
–A. M. Homes
“Beautiful Children careens from the seedy to the beautiful, the domestic to the epic, all with huge and exacting heart.”
–Jonathan Safran Foer
“Beautiful Children is the best first novel I’ve read in years–certainly the best first novel of our newborn century. Charles Bock has written a masterpiece: tragic, comic, sexy, chilling, far-reaching, and wise–at once an accusation and a consolation, and a lucid portrait of what is happening at the very heart of our culture, and what it means to be a young American today.”
–Sean Wilsey
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| Customer Reviews: Read 35 more reviews...
 Nothing beautiful about it August 24, 2008
This book was horrible. I expected something at least interesting from reading the jacket but ended up with a book that despite all of the attempts to be shocking is really quite boring. I forced myself to plow through this book because I like to finish books once I begin them but it never redeems itself though it does get the tiniest more interesting around section three (which occurs 269 pages into the book). There is no strong sense of story or suspense. Not too much ever really happens. Passages describe small acts or descriptions of things in minutia and the constant skipping around from past to present to future and dislikable character to dislikable character means I never got drawn into the story and what is going to happen to the people in it. Also, though I expected the book to be dark (and often like my books that way), with a title like Beautiful Children I also expected some beauty, some glimmer of something transcendent or enlightening. What I got instead was a portrayal of an ugly jaded and dull world with no beauty in it. Parts of the story also made me grimace because it just felt like the author was trying too hard. The harsh language, the sex, the teenage slang, the chat room jargon. These could have their place but instead they are what the characters are reduced to. I felt like Bock used these elements as an attempt to shock the reader or to try to make himself and his characters sound more "authentic". It had the opposite effect. The characters become caricatures. I am not one to like "suger coated" stories and generally like what I consider a more unvarnished portrayal of things but I found the obsession with rough sex scenes like those found in porn and Cheri the stripper and her candle holder nipples unnecessary. I found myself wondering why Bock spent so much time writing these voyuristic scenes in such detail. Did he want me as the reader to "get off" on them? Is he trying to use sex to sell his book or shock his readers enough to get publicity? Is he trying to prove how "real" and "nitty gritty" his story is? Well, sorry. I am not shocked. I am not aroused. The scenes added nothing to the story. His time would have been better spent actually developing his characters. Maybe he could have humanized Cheri and made her a real multi faceted person. Instead he exploits his characters as much as the characters in his book do.
 Ugh, tedious August 18, 2008
Cant even get through the audiobook. The author goes into tedious minutae about their hair, clothes, underwear, shoes etc ad nauseum to the point that I thought he was a crime scene investigator. So much detail that you cant figure out what the story is. Its too bad because the idea for the book is very good.
Not good... August 11, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This novel is neither well-written nor interesting. I won't repeat what other reviewers have identified as the major problems with it (see the one- and two-star reviews for details). I was very disappointed, as I had read some good reviews. Borrow it from your local library to see if you like it before purchasing it.
decent June 9, 2008
somewhat disappointing after all the media attention this book received. can just picture Bock sitting in his dark little apartment, relishing his every sentence. not that there's anything wrong with that...but the writing seems too self-conscious. reminds me of a cheesy film noir. the theme that ties it all together is poorly and over-done. not even really that good a picture of las vegas.
Boring May 15, 2008
3 out of 4 found this review helpful
This has to be one of the most boring books that I have attempted to read in a long while. The dilogue serves only to narrowly portray bizarre and generally uninteresting and boorish characters. There is no story, no plot, no thread, except for a commonality in a venue -- Las Vegas. If this effort is truly, "heralding the arrival of a major new writer." the book world is in for a great gain of obscurity.
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