What readers think of The Monsters of Templeton, plus links to write your own review.

What an amazing, creative and outright original book! (And it was Lauren Groff's first novel, too.) This is a two-dimensional story; one part takes place in the present day, while the other takes place some 200 years ago.

Wilhelmina Sunshine Upton, who goes by Willie, is 28 and working on her PhD in anthropology at Stanford. After a passionate affair with her adviser in the tundra of Alaska when they are on a dig, she is pregnant and returns home to Templeton, New York. This idyllic town with a very large lake that is hundreds of feet deep, is modeled on Cooperstown. The day a bedraggled Willie rolls into town, a dead prehistoric "monster" surfaces on the lake.

Willie's mother, Vi, is an aging hippie-turned-born again Christian, who has always told Willie that her father was one of three men with whom she lived in a house in San Francisco in the '60s. It turns out that isn't true. Willie's dad is a man who lives in Templeton. Willie now has a quest: Find out the name of her father.

Fasten your seatbelts, reader. You are in for a ride. Monsters aren't the only thing in Templeton. And some monsters aren't quite as easy to see as the one that came out of the lake.

P.S. Lauren Groff should get some sort of award for the characters' names. Here is just a sampling: Marmaduke Templeton, Noname, Minnie Phinney, Primus Dwyer and Asterisk Upton…just to name a few. And they are as quirky and original as their names!

This book is hard to categorize, part fiction, mystery and fantasy.

Willie (Wilhelmina) Upton has returned to her hometown of Templeton NY. She has left school at Stanford in disgrace and hopes to hide away in the town that her family has lived in for generations. On the day she arrives an enormous monster dies and rises to the surface of Lake Glimmerglass. Not knowing what to expect when she finally goes home to her mother she is shocked when Vi informs Willie that she lied about her father being a one night stand and that her true father lives in Templeton. So Willie sets out to find the truth about her father and along the way uncovers many family secrets and a few other ‘monsters’.

I really, really liked this book. I loved the plot, the delving into the past, hearing the story in many different voices. I love the magic and supernatural embellishments; they added another fun layer to the story. There is more than one monster in this tale and it was so well done and enjoyable I was sorry to see it end; I have so many questions about so many of the characters I am longing for a sequel!!!

I wish I could say that I loved this book, but I didn't. I was looking forward to it with high expectations because I had read a story by the author in the 2007 Best American Short Stories which just took my breath away.

I think this is an ambitious novel with plenty of elements that I usually like: a young woman who is quirky and intelligent, plenty of history, a family tree which figures in the story and a bit of the supernatural. But I found it hard to follow, which is saying a lot, because I can follow even the most convoluted novels. I just could not completely believe Willie Upton, the twenty-something heroine and I could not get a grasp of her mother, Vi, in such a way as to feel involved with either one.

Willie has gotten herself into a jam and come home from an archeology dig that would have figured in her graduate thesis. She feels she has totally blown it and that her life is ruined. For such an independent and intelligent young woman, she spends the whole book being nasty to the mother she came home to for shelter and being about as silly emotionally as any chick lit heroine. It didn't seem to fit together right.

Getting through the novel was an effort, took way too long for a mere 361 pages and while the reader is supposed to feel that Willie changed and grew, I didn't. However, due to the story that introduced me to Lauren Groff and to the large amount of potential I see in the novel, I will certainly read the next one she writes.