What is it about 600 pages books that make them somewhat dull to me? First The Little Friend, and now Sunnyside by Glen David Gold. While it is not a big failure, and to be fair, neither was The Little Friend, it is just that these books were underwhelming, and they shouldn’t be, due to their sizes and the premises that had a lot of promise. Sometimes, I am not in the right mindset when I read, and I wander off and end up just reading words on the page. We all do that sometimes (I mean, nobody has that machine-like concentration?), but a good book can pull you forcibly, despite your bad days and wandering attention. I always try to give a book a fair shake, but sometimes a book doesn’t move you, and it is nobody’s fault, and it doesn’t make it a bad book, and Sunnyside really isn’t a bad book. It actually had a few surprising moments that showed Gold’s talent enough that I am eager to read his bigger hit, Carter Beats the Devil. The story revolves around the great Charlie Chaplin, where a mass sighting of him in 800 different places coincides with a period of great creative strife. From there, we go over to Europe during WWI, and follow to different soldiers, conflicted by the horrors of war and idealism. If it were a 300-page book about Chaplin’s struggle with his creativity, and the horrors of his popularity, this book would have been a smash, but the WWI stories derail this novel too much, and I give it a passing grade solely for the fictionalized Chaplin arc. It is nothing special, and it has an okay ending that adds a hint of sympathy to the preceding 600 pages, but it is the only thing that really keeps the book afloat.
Rating: 4/5
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