What do readers think of Evelyn in Transit by David Guterson? Write your own review.

I really looked forward to reading this book because I have enjoyed others by this author. I was very disappointed however. I felt it was disjointed and confusing. Evelyn is likeable enough for her quirkiness and Cliff is precocious and lovable, but the other characters are too strange for my taste. Maybe I'm just not smart enough to get the point of the story.

Evelyn in Transit is not a book I enjoyed reading. Typically, I can find positive things to say and for this book, I do believe the writer can write and hence I will look to read his best selling book called Snow Falling on Cedars. As for this book, every time I returned to pick up where I left off, it just constantly felt like a lot of very disjointed paragraphs rambling on chapter after chapter. This book felt like a very odd combination of characters and events that went beyond not holding my attention, I actually had a strong dislike for the characters and more to the point, the actions and thoughts the author wrote about as he was describing to the reader who each person was as they entered and left quickly in every chapter. It read like a weird collection of thoughts and events that did not add up to much in terms of action or plot. I did not like the characters as they were presented as individuals who said odd things and had strange thoughts. Another example of feeling uncomfortable the more I read was how the author described Sateen's illness, the student's behaviors at the Matrix, Evelyn's colleagues at the various jobs she had described in various paragraphs outlining interactions in the first half of the book. Overall, I wanted to like the book but I could not overcome the feeling of reading a bunch of disjointed memories randomly written down to fill up pages, chapters and eventually a book about people's interactions and thoughts that I did not care for. I will be interested in seeing how others feel after reading it and seeing what perhaps I missed by not being able to overcome the bad mood reading this book put me in every time I picked it up. I look forward to listening to an author interview with David Guterson at some point to hear his perspective about the characters and what was described as their desire to lead a good life. My desire was to read a book I could not put down and that took me to another place and time and introduced me to people I was interested in. This, sad to say, was not that type of book for me.