It all begins with an unexpected phone call. Fran, who was abandoned by her mother at the tender age of 14, tries desperately to re-connect with her long-lost mother over the phone. But instead, she is drawn unwittingly into her mother's strange family tales. Illustrated with real photos from the author's own family, "A House Named Brazil" contains tales so captivating you'll forget they are fiction. From miraculously preserved bodies, to professional pickpockets to organized crime bosses, the characters which populate Schulman's story will soon become a part of your own twisted family tree.

Up there with THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA, PALACE WALK, EAST OF EDEN, every great book you've ever loved. Birth and death and the magic of life in between. A celebration of the endurance and beauty of the human spirit.

I was enchanted by this novel that explores the powerful role of myth in a family. Through a series of phone calls from her distant mother, the heroine (and the reader) learns where she and her mother are from -- and how they came to be the way they are. It's psychological, adventurous, and, ultimately, very satisfying. Ms. Schulman is a gifted writer and story teller. I've also read her other two books (The Cage and Swimming with Jonah) and am eagerly waiting for more.

Well, first off the first 80pages were useless, just a short bio of the main character Beryl and little events describing what she would be doing. After that, the next 50pages was basicly a character analysis which was mildly interesting at best. The next 40 pages were mildly interesting, describing the bears what they were like, which helped with the following pages, but was still not that interesting. The last 30-40pages were actually really good, and I was hooked for those 30-40pages. Until the ending! To say the least it was one of the worst endings I have ever read, it was a horrible ending. None of the problems were ever really solved, you don't even know if one of the characters even lived, and you never even know how things worked out in the end for the character(s), too many things were left untold to make it even close to a solid ending. I hope nobody ever reads this book, it's too big of a let down to justify reading it.

I picked this book up out of a stack of freebies several years ago, and continually passed it over when browsing my bookshelves for a new read. Last night, I picked it up, reread the back cover, and gave it a shot. Less than four hours later, I finished the book with arched eyebrows, very pleasantly surprised by how good it was.

Schulman does an *excellent* job of placing the reader in the moment with her highly-descriptive writing. The amount of detail is perfect - never so much that the story drags while describing the setting, but almost always enough so that the reader can feel the depth of the cold, smell the polar bears, and hear the crunch of snow.

She also does a wonderful job of conveying the protagonist's thought processes and she undergoes radical changes in how she thinks of herself and the world through her challenges. This *may* be a book enjoyed more by women than by men - I don't mean to say that men won't understand it, rather that women (on the whole) might relate more intimately with how the main character thinks and feel.

I'll definitely pick up the other books by this author - I very much enjoyed her writing voice.

It's very hot in LA right now, especially where I live, which is near Pasadena. But there's a window of time every evening, after dark and after dinner, when it's cool enough to sit on the front porch and read. It's one of the few ways I can appreciate summer. I usually drink wine, and if I have a very good book in my hands I can sometimes look up, listen to the crickets, see the moon passing over the hill in front of my house, and palpably sense the presence of a near perfect moment. This last week that book has been The Cage. It's a short wonderful book, and it's about the Arctic and polar bears. It has everything I like in a book--the writing is beautiful and keeps me on the surface, the narrator becomes a compelling character and draws me in, the story is engaging and keeps me going forward. And it's about the Arctic and polar bears, two of my favorite subjects. Now it's over, I've turned the last page. And I don't think I will find another book this summer so well suited to the heat of July and August as this one.

I just finished this book and am fairly disappointed. Thank God I got it at the library instead of buying it. It started interestingly enough with the story of how Jane's father became a man, but Jane's own metamorphosis slowly (or should I say "slow") bogs down. The characters seem flat and trapped in endless medical jargon. By the end, the book only succeeded in putting me in as much of a trance as Jane. The reviews on the cover described the end as "chilling" and "shocking," but it was more just an unsurprising, unsatisfying resolution of a mediocre plot.

I agree the descriptions were quite intensive, but they were usually tangents off the story that lead nowhere. I noted that some people found Jane interesting because she was an overweight, passive girl who turns into a thin, passive woman. It's nice to see weight loss used as a transitional element in the story. *sighs* I think a much, much better take on the same themes can be found in Stephen Chbosky's The Perks of Being a Wallflower.

Swimming with Jonah is a complex novel. The main character, Jane, evolves almost in real-time as the reader moves through the book. Her actions and reactions are subtle; the reader looking for mindless escapism should pass this one by. The characters are all well-developed. From their gestures and manner of speaking, to the energy that seems to come off the page from each of them. Keefer's death at the end of the book is symptomatic of the person he was. Jane's catharsis at the end of the novel is natural, it is obvious that she could do nothing else. Schulman's characters are memorable, not for their unsual names or sweeping gestures but for what they don't do or say; they are true. This story is not about a dramatic life-change so much as it is a map of Jane's shift from girl to woman. The island setting, while exotic and beautifully rendered, is less a culprit than a nuance in her overall development. While this book may strike some as plodding, for those who allow the story to evelope them, it is an unforgettable jorney into the mind of another person. This is one of the most brilliant novels written in the last decade.

I checked this book out one summer while on break and working on campus at the University of Denver. I cannot even really explain how it affected me. It is more of a feeling than anything else - I like how Schulman's books make me FEEL when I read them. Since reading Swimming for the first time, I have read The Cage and A House Named Brazil and now own all three. I can only hope to read more of what she has written. This story will touch you in a place you have long forgotten. You will remember your body and your relationships and re-invent them the way that Jane does in the book - Bravo!