Our book club really enjoyed this book. We were able to have many discussions about both the story lines as well as the author's choices. Most enjoyed the multi-layered, multi-generational story line, but be prepared for a complex read. Everyone in our book club agreed that the multiple story lines were compelling.

My book club raved about this book! It was so beautiful and interesting. When we finished we all felt like we wanted to start over again in order to better understand the story and the characters. It's very interesting to see some of the similarities between this book and books by Jonathan Saffron Foer, Nicole Krauss's husband. I highly recommend this book! It's a great read and lends itself well to a group discussion.

Our book club enjoyed this book. The discussion was looked forward to by many to help understand the multi-layered multi-generational story. Many wanted to read it over to better understand the links. Definitely not a light read but an enjoyable one.

I read and listened to tapes of this book -

This young author has written a terrific, multi-layed book with fabulous characters. I keep scanning the shelves to find a new book by Krauss. I predict that she'll be a major talent.

It was a beautifully written book. It was kind of hard to follow since it had a lot of hard to pronounce Polish names and two characters with the same name. Also, it was one of those books that didn't completely make sense (the a-ha moment) until you were about 50 pages from the end. It didn't provide for a lot of discussion at our book club, other than to say it was confusing.

Love, love, love it!! This book produced the longest discussion we have had yet at our meetings. Even though it produced the longest discussion, we left wanting to re-read it just to pick up the subtle nuances that others picked up that we missed. A wonderful tale told of how a lost book can affect many people over a multi-generational gap. We simply loved it!

It was a while ago that I read this book, but it has stood out among others as being very imaginative and moving. This is especially true in how the author interweaves the lives and stories of the old man and young girl. One of the best!

This is one of the best books I've read in a long time. The characterization is fabulous...the pages just kept turning! Highly recommended!

No one in our group liked this book. Everyone found it confusing and felt that it came to no cohesive conclusion. This was the least popular book our group read this year. After reading the preceding reviews, it would seem that other groups found something in this book that we did not.

This book was beautiful, sad and lovely, but hard to follow. I liked Krauss' characters - Leo has been every fumbling old man I've seen since reading this story! The writing style for each (Leo/Alma) was a unique and enjoyable style. The chapters from the fictional "History" were original and thought provoking. Yet following the history of the tale the way the author laid it out made for a frustrating read.

I really liked it. It was a little confusing but worth the work of flipping back and forth to figure out the characters. The ending ties it all together, and I would recommend this book.

Didn't like mind of protagonist. Obsession rampant in characters. Ending did not atone for foregoing rantings.
Entire book depressing.

I was very confused in this book because there seemed to be so many stories going on and constantly introducing new characters!

It wasn't a bad book. We have definitely read worse! It was just a little confusing and hard to keep track of the characters at times.

Lots to talk about with this one. It was confusing at some points in the book, but in all most of us enjoyed it.

I fell in love with Leo right away. This book made me laugh, and cry by page 6. It gets a little confussing by switching several narrators, but comes all together again by the end.

If I had more stars to give, I would give them. I read this book once, then recommended it for our book club as I knew it would be a great discussion book and perhaps give me more perspective. I didn't expect that we would have the very best book club discussion we have ever had and that I would gain even more insight than I dreamed of.
You can read other reviews for synopsis of characters so I won't repeat. I appreciated and loved the effect of the tiny illustrations at the beginning of each chapter (heart-"Leo", compass-"Alma", Noah's Ark-"Bird", etc) to alert the reader as to whose "voice" the chapter pertains to.
"The History of Love" is quirky, beautiful, complicated yet simple (much like love) and continues to loop through my mind long after the last chapter was read.

Confusing times, places & characters. We all liked the main character, crusty, old, sad but alive Leo Gursky. Lively discussion about whether or not a 14-yr-old girl would go to such great lengths to help her lonely & depressed mother and her Messianic younger brother. Discussion about Jewish identity: are you a Polish Jew or a Jewish Pole? and how that identity changes with the different generations.

Our club read this book and we spent most of our time lost. Nobody got it - very confusing and quite frankly a waste of time. Very dreary and hard to follow.

I wanted to re-read this book as soon as I finished, so that I could make connections that I missed the first time through. It is quirky and insightful, sad and hopeful. Although it was a bit confusing, this made it a great discussion for our club.

I really liked this book. Knowing it was confusing from earlier reviews was helpful to me so I paid more attention from the beginning. It was touching and well written.

Leo Gursky is a character that will stay with me for a really long time for many reasons. I found him so incredibly real and endearing. He was flawed and lovable and pitiable and brilliant. His loneliness breaks the readers heart. I was almost brought to tears at the end of the story and even now, a week later, thinking about it, my heart swells a bit. I had a very strong reaction to this one character, and thus a strong reaction to the story as a whole. I came to my book club meeting exclaiming, "I loved this book!" Unfortunately, I seemed to be the only one with any strong feelings one way or the other. So while I would recommend this book to others, I'm not sure that it is a good book for a book club. We had very little to talk about for some reason. Which really surprised me. But once we all sat down there just wasn't much to say.

This book was confusing, odd and difficult to follow. Any lesson to be gained from the story or even entertainment from what is supposed to be a touching story is lost in confusion about what is going on. I would not recommend this book to anyone who didn't have weeks to waste trying to figure out what was going on.

I am sure there is a lot here for discussion but this was just not my type of book.
I found it difficult to transition between the story line of the different characters when the
narrator changed by chapter. It would take a paragraph before I realized the story line had
changed. Maybe I am dense but it took a chapter or two to tell between the two "Almas" also.
Somehow the author needed a technique to make the transitions more easily apparent to
those of us that are more dense readers.

Our book club unanimously enjoyed this book. We all agreed it was confusing at times and we had trouble keeping track of some of the characters at the middle of the book. However, everyone loved the ending and how the twists and turns of the book came together. Because of these elements, it prompted a good discussion - so I'd recommend it to another club.

My group enjoyed discussing this book. It is the first book we've spent more than 20 minutes on before plunging into personal lives and snacks! But it is a complicated read. It's a re-read. It's a love it or hate it. It's NOT a before bed book, because it's too complicated. I'm still not sure what I was supposed to get out of it, but I enjoyed the story along the way!

I enjoyed the characters, and the ending

This book was brilliant. Krauss' writing skills are beyond reproach. Her words are carefully chosen and her sentences are beautifully crafted. That said, I have to tell you our group found her novel quite confusing and they would have enjoyed it more knowing what was real and what was in Leo's imagination. Not for all book clubs but if your book club enjoys advanced lit challenges, they will have a wonderful experience reading and discussing The History of Love.