The Feast of Love: A Novel

I loved this book ... it was very meaningful to me and I read it slowly, savoring it like the Feast it is. Exquisitely written prose and carefully intertwined stories about the many forms of love, including the heady, delicious, difficult, soaring, crashing beginnings/middles/ends of relationships.

A great, quick read. If you are a romantic, you will love it; if you are a cynic, you will enjoy it. It kind of reminded me a of "Love, Actually" but with a more realistic and dramatic plot. Great book.

Pet peeve: a book ostensibly from multiple characters' viewpoints yet all share the same (distinct, authorial) voice. Why does everyone love this book?

This novel took me about 50 pages to get into it but then I was hooked and finished pretty quickly. It is set in Ann Arbor where I was born so that was a plus for me. The characters all have very different love histories and stories, but yet they are interwoven and it's even a bit suspenseful at the end. Very well crafted novel!

For years I avoided reading Baxter, mostly because his stories and settings didn't seem compelling to me. I picked up this book at a used book sale, and sat down to read it with low expectations.

The easygoing prose style and the willful lack of plot at first seemed daunting; but in time I began to admire the care and honest clear-eyed consideration that Baxter was bringing to what most be one of the world's oldest subjects: romantic love.

In addition, one has to admire how evocative the book's setting is of the Midwest; and it is certainly full of realistic and familiar but genuine characters. I can say that this book has converted me into a Baxter admirer, and while I can't recommend this book to all readers, I can say that for those who enjoy their lit fiction seasoned with more lite philosophy than plot, this will go down well; and the narrative really does achieve affecting emotional torque in some of its final pages. It is, indeed, let it be said, a feast of love. Just make sure that's what you're hungry for.

I couldn't finish this book. HATED IT. The writing isn't all that bad but the story is incredibly stagnant. Pained me to read it!

I really liked this one. If you've seen the movie that was based on the book, it's a load of crap and doesn't do the novel any justice.

We read this in my 201 class, and it was well done. It's about all of the different types of love in the world, and how you can desperately love someone who you can't be with, or how many times we're with people out of convenience rather than love. It's not the best book out there, but if you're feeling like thinking about love, it's an interesting read.

I always think I am not going to like this guy's stuff, and then I end up liking it in spite of myself. I enjoyed parts of this book very much... the characters and the musings. I wouldn't put it up with my favorites though.

This was the worst book I've attempted to read in a long time. I gave up on it less than a quarter of the way through, which is really saying a lot for me because I NEVER, seriously, never give up on books. But I couldn't stand this. It made my skin crawl in its terrible writing. It was cliched, the characters were not compelling, telling instead of showing.. just poorly written all around and I finally neglected it for so long that I said, why am I torturing myself with this book? So I've put it down and am now reading Barbara Kingsolver, who any book of hers would be better than this book.