PositiveEvening Standard (UK)One reason Goon Squad is remembered as one of the best novels of its decade, and arguably the century so far, is its virtuoso experiments with form ... The Candy House makes similar attempts to innovate ... [It] drags a little and feels superfluous; it’s as though Egan, in her determination to recapture the freewheeling spirit of Goon Squad, is doing something different for different’s sake ... But elsewhere the old magic is successfully recaptured, and for long stretches, The Candy House is just as compelling as its predecessor ... There are memorable characters ... How these characters and events all relate back to the cast of Goon Squad is too complicated to explain here, but it’s fair to say the patchwork of narratives in The Candy House doesn’t knit together with quite the same brilliance ... If the candy house here refers to the powerful allure of the internet and social media, then Egan is less sure-footed about the dangers of where it may be leading us. But she is hardly alone in that, and The Candy House mounts as strong a case as any novel from the past decade for using fiction as a way to try and figure it all out.
