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    Three Stages of Amazement: A Novel
    Three Stages of Amazement: A Novel
    Three Stages of Amazement: A Novel
    Audiobook11 hours

    Three Stages of Amazement: A Novel

    Written by Carol Edgarian

    Narrated by Anne Twomey

    3/5

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    About this audiobook

    The New York Times bestseller, a “furiously compelling” (New York Times) and richly compassionate novel about marriage, ambition, and reclaiming of love—by novelist and cofounder of the online fiction magazine Narrative.

    Set in San Francisco, Three Stages of Amazement takes readers on a spellbinding journey across a landscape of national unease, when the fragility of one marriage reflects the tenuous state of the American Dream. Lena Rusch and her husband, Charlie Pepper, still believe they can have it all—sex, love, marriage, children, career, brilliance. But when life delivers surprises and tests, they must face, for the first time in their lives, real limitation.

    Told with eloquence and compassion, Three Stages of Amazement is a true thriller of the heart—about confronting adversity, gaining wisdom, and finding great love.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSimon & Schuster Audio
    Release dateMar 8, 2011
    ISBN9781442344464
    Author

    Carol Edgarian

    New York Times bestselling author Carol Edgarian’s novels include Vera, Three Stages of Amazement, and Rise the Euphrates. Her essays and articles regularly appear in national magazines and anthologies, and she is editor of The Writer’s Life: Intimate Thoughts on Work, Love, Inspiration, and Fame. She is cofounder and editor of Narrative, a leading digital publisher of fiction, poetry, essays and art, and Narrative in the Schools, which provides free reading and writing resources to students and teachers in nineteen countries. She lives in San Francisco with her family.

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    Reviews for Three Stages of Amazement

    3/5

    53 ratings7 reviews

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    • 5/5
      A little confusing at times, but satisfying in the end
    • 3/5
      I didn't think the book lived up to the hype. It was extremely well-written with great promise, but in the end, the perfection proved to be its flaw.

      I've read better books about the Great Recession, broken marriages, and overachievers underachieving in life. Books that were somehow better because of their imperfections.

      If you want an imperfect novel about an imperfect world full of imperfect people with great ambitions who have lost who they truly are, read THIS IS WHERE WE LIVE by Janelle Brown. She is the Great Dickens of our times.
    • 3/5
      Really, this is a two-star book, but I'm giving it an extra star because Theo reminds me so much of my older son. I really did like the portrayal Lena's relationship with her children, but I disliked pretty much everything else.
    • 2/5
      This could have been a good book but wasnt even close. Disjointed, hard to follow, awkward style of writing. I kep hoping it would get better,
    • 2/5
      I liked the premise of the story - marriage, love, loss. It had the making of a good family story. Unfortunately, I did not care for the writing style at all. The book seemed to be trying to hard to be a literary novel. I felt that the story itself got lost in the writing attempt.
    • 2/5
      Three Stages of Amazement chronicles a year in the life of one couple--Lena Rush and Charlie Pepper, and their acquaintances and families. Lena and Charlie are a talented and smart couple--Lena a documentary journalist, Charlie a gifted surgeon. Charlie has decided to give up a job a Mass General to start a new business, where he will help to develop and sell a surgeon robot. The great rescession has taken away Charlie's funding, leaving him in a bind where he will need to turn to the one person Lena hates to try to save his business. Meanwhile, Lena is struggling to deal with the death of one of the couple's premature twin daughters while trying to keep the other daughter alive. These events will challenge the couple's marriage as others in their world struggle to keep their lives together. This was a challenging book for me to get through. At times, I thought the novel soared. I found the story was intense and the dialogue engaging. At other times it completely dragged. The author spent way too much time focusing on what I thought were minor characters and the opulence of their lives, including extensive name dropping in one elaborate party scene that seemed to last for a quarter of the novel. My other problem with this novel was that I really disliked all of the characters. They all seemed too wraped up in their own emotions, their own needs, their own lives, to take others in to account. Maybe this is the point of the novel, and where the central plot element hinges, but I still found it difficult to become really engaged in this story full of selfish people that continually whined about how much the economic downturn had hurt them. But none of the central characters were truly poor or without options, so I found it hard to empathize with them, just as it's hard to feel sorry for the millionare bankers and mortgage brokers after the economic bust. I do think this book had an interesting perspective on how stress pulls at the modern American marriage and life. But there were too many other things in this novel that made me dislike it overall.
    • 4/5
      Put in the most simplistic terms, Julia Glass in San Francisco. A good read.