Beginner's Greek: A Novel | James Collins

Beginner's Greek: A Novel | James Collins | For love and ...finance?

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Beginner's Greek: ...

	Beginner's Greek: A Novel James Collins Little, Brown and Company, 2008 - 448 pages average customer review:based on 129 reviews view larger image
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Lives up to the hype

James Collins' debut novel reads with a stylish, old-school charm reminiscent of F. Scott Fitzgerald's Jazz Age, though without the dark, alcohol-soaked undercurrents.

As well it should. At age 50, Collins himself is the product of a gilt-edged Northeastern upbringing, growing up on Fifth Avenue and attending Harvard and Columbia Business School before embarking on a productive career, first in finance, then as an editor at Spy and Time magazines.

The book itself sets up with the protagonist Peter Russell, a Wall Street wunderkind with a soulful side, meeting the beautiful, intelligent woman of his dreams on a cross-country flight from New York to Los Angeles. As they part, she gives him her name and number, which he manages to lose. Their attempts to romantically reconnect fuel the rest of the book.

Along the way, Collins infuses his prose with enough interesting characters, comedy and knowing winks and nods to prevent it from falling victim to a sickly sweetness.

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For love and ...finance?

Beginner's Greek is the first novel by James Collins. It follows the journey of a young man named Peter Russell, who happens to be a hopeless romantic. Peter has always known that someday he'd meet his true love on airplane. He knows the idea is ridiculous and yet somehow he just knows that one day... it will happen for him. Well, one day he really does meet the girl of dreams and really does fall for her. She seems to reciprocate the feeling and writes her number on a page from the book "The Magic Mountain", by Thomas Mann. She slips it in his shirt pocket, and walks away feeling like a million bucks. Somehow, in the ultimate act of idiocy... he loses the number! Miraculously, life or fate brings her back into his life... but things are far from smooth sailing.

This book examines the journey and trials of love that is the life of Peter and Holly... It also peers into the mundane everyday adventures of Peter, who works at a Wall street firm. In a broader sense, it's a book about love, trials, honesty, hope, success and failure.

As always, here's the good and the bad:

Good: The core of the story is very sweet and endearing. It does show the spirit of sacrifice that embodies the idea of "true love" and what we are willing to do for it. The message here is not what we would do for true love, but what we're willing to do and sacrifice to make the person we truly love, happy. It gives a pretty accurate window into the hearts of the hopeless romantics of the world... and believe me, I should know. I'm as hopeless as they get :) The elements that work the best are definitely the parts about Peter and Holly. They are the two characters in the book that you can't help but love. And you can't help but want them to be together. You also can't help but be moved by their actions.

Bad: My opinion is that a book about love should not dive into depth about matters pertaining to finance, the rat race, and other excessive technical details. It almost seems like the author is going out of his way to illustrate how much he knows and understands about Wall Street, the culture, and it's inner workings. I found these segments (and they are quite lengthy... especially in the first half of the book) to be very hard to enjoy. In fact, at times I felt that I was reading a boring textbook on economics. Another analogy would be having to watch a boring long commercial right after you've been pulled into an interesting movie. And we all know how annoying that can be. That's exactly what this book does. It pulls you in the Epilogue, but you don't get what you want... the heart of the book until about halfway through the entire book. If I were just reading this book for fun, I probably would have quit two thirds of the way in. But because I was reading it for review purposes, I willed myself to finish it. However, I'm really glad that I did finish it because it really is a sweet story.

Conclusion: The way this book is written is overly complex. I believe that the same effect could've been achieved using much simpler means. It's almost as if the author is trying to "show" how cultured and intelligent he is by using the complex details and subtext. However, it needlessly overpowers the main story. It comes off kind of snobbish actually. But as I've said, the core of the story... the personal accounts of Holly and Peter and the intimate segments of their story are worth reading. If you can weather the storm of "long boring commercials" of the first half of the book, you will truly enjoy and reap the rewards of the second half. I hope your will and determination is strong :)

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Bad Title; Good Book

This genre of book is not my usual fare, but I'm happy to say that I enjoyed reading it anyway. The book reads like a romantic comedy you might have seen, Serendipity, as it details how a man and woman meet and then try to find each other again through various roadblocks life throws at them.

Thoroughly entertaining.

A great beach read

I bought this on the advice of a friend and read on the beach during spring break. It's an easy and entertaining story, but definitely a lemon chiffon pie. There were a few distracting editorial issues, but overall, I took it for what it is and thoroughly enjoyed it.

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