Rating: 
Summary: Hornby Writing with a Woman's Voice
Review: Hornby challenges basic liberal notions in "How to be Good," and does so while writing in the voice of a woman. What does it mean to be a truly good person? How do you balance out how your actions will affect another person? While you are doing "good" for someone else, you may be hurting another. I'm a big fan of Hornby and I liked this departure from his norm. He must have listened to his female friends in developing the voice and psyche of Katie. At one point in the novel, she realized the chaos that her life has become, and as her former lover and husband discuss her future over her own kitchen table, she wishes that they would just make a decision for her, and if they did, she would live with it, and live with it forever. She was tired of fighting, tired of trying to be "good" and was ready to relinquish control if it were an option. I don't know that most men could understand that sometimes that's just how a woman may feel.
Rating: 
Summary: Why did I keep thinking of 'Millroy the Magician'?
Review: I found this to be a rather confused novel. Why did the woman have to have that adulterous affair at the start - was all that followed just a punishment? Did GoodNews have real powers, but if so, why were they so confused? (But he did perform 'miracles'.) Why did the husband have his transformation which was so problematic? The only character I really liked was the rapidly dismissed preacher - at least she did have some wisdom if not peace of mind. But the eccentric GoodNews reminded me so much of Paul Theroux's 'Millroy the Magician'. Theroux's 'miracle' worker, however was full of eccentric but wonderful alternative views of the world. My family are vegetarians (not vegans) so we had some common ground with Millroy - I quickly adopted Millroy's saying - we don't eat anything that had a mother. There was another curious linking of these novels. I noted when reading Millroy that two minor characters were called Phil and Dick - minor characters that were closely linked. Had Mr Theroux, I wondered, been reading my favourite author Philip K Dick? And suddenly in 'How to be Good' I came across two minor characters called Christopher and Hope - Christopher Hope is another author I have read and enjoyed. 'How to be Good' is entertaining in a confused way - but I didn't like its reflections on morality (it seems to me that adultery is a poorly understood 'misdemeanour' that is used to justify all sorts of outcomes - mostly unsupportable). If you like eccentric 'miracle' workers, with alternative views to the way we should live our life, read 'Millroy the Magicain' instead.
Rating: 
Summary: Nick Hornby Knows How To be good, But.......
Review: It starts out great. It gets better. Sure, it's a stretch of a plot, the kids speak like adults, cynical, jaded, world-weary adults at that. Ok, granted. However,I really liked Katie, and wanted to continue reading to know more about her and her angry man-turned do-gooder husband, and to find out how GoodNews would get his-plus chuckle at a bunch of really witty dialogue and observations. The real problem was, the ending. It didn't really end. It was like Hornby just said, OK, enough, let's end it here, closed his eyes and pointed. Or maybe i just didn't get it. I loved and "got" his other two books, though, so I don't think it's just me. I was rating this a 4 star, up to the last paragraph.
Rating:
Summary: Another great, but different, Hornby novel
Review: If for nothing else, Nick Hornby deserves a great deal of credit for not playing it safe. After becoming a literary superstar with "High Fidelity" and "About a Boy", Hornby very easily could have done the safe thing and churned out yet another book about the average 30-something male's inability to mature and face commitment. I doubt his publisher, agent, or anyone else with a financial stake in his success would have complained. It is to Hornby's credit that he tried something different this time. The risk, of course, is that Hornby fans expecting the same high energy and consistent hilarity of his previous two novels are sure to be disappointed, not because the quality of "How To Be Good" is any lower than those other works, it is just very different. While "How To Be Good" has its share of laughs, it is altogether more serious and more philosophical than any of his previous fiction. All sorts of difficult and interesting questions are brought up in "How To Be Good", such as how do our actual selves differ from the ideal vision of ourselves that we have in our mind? How much of a responsibility to be charitable do any of us have? What defines a good person? Is it selfish to use extra money and resources for material pleasures instead of giving it to those who could use it for basic needs? Why is it that some people can be extremely charitable with strangers, but make a mess out of their own personal relationships? Is it wrong to sometimes have the feeling of not liking your spouse? Or your children? No writer that I know of is better than Hornby at handing readers a mirror and forcing us to look at characters who are very much like ourselves. Until sitting down with a Hornby novel, you forget how rare it is to read about characters that face the same problems, have the same insecurities, the same guilt, the same fears that you and I do. In this novel, as always, Hornby creates characters who are filled with flaws, make wrong decisions, say the wrong things, but are still endearing, because they are simply making the same mistakes we all make from time to time.
Rating: 
Summary: Disapointing...
Review: I loved High Fidelity and especially About A Boy, but this one was just no good. Neither characters nor plot ring true at all, and Hornby never really arrives at any conclusions. Hornby has shown that he can do much, much better, so save your time and money and pass on this one.
Rating: 
Summary: Can you be TOO good? And if not, why aren't you doing more?
Review: Hornby perfectly catches the voice of a woman fed up by her husband and asking for a divorce. Katie Carr is a doctor in London and figures that she is by default a "good person". She is married to David, who writes a column called "The Angriest Man in Holloway" in which he rants and raves over minutaie. Being angry is his job! Then one day David by chance visits a chiropractor/guru named "DJ Goodnews" and decides he wants to be different. He starts by inviting Goodnews to live with him, Katie and their 2 children. Then he takes one of the kids' computers and donates it to a woman's shelter, telling the kids to share. He organizes a neighborhood rally to open up their spare rooms and take in wayward youth. David is no longer the man Katie wanted to divorce, but she's not sure she wants to be married to this one either! David's unadulterated "goodness" makes Katie uncomfortable with whether she is really good or just telling herself she is. which makes her and the reader ask "Can you be TOO good? And if not, why aren't you doing more?"
Rating:
Summary: What Happened?
Review: I loved High Fidelity and About A Boy, plus enjoyed Fever Pitch, so I was very excited to find this new book by Nick Hornby. What a terrible, horrible, boring, unrealistic book. Why does someone who writes so well from a male perspective, try to write from a female perspective and do this with absolutely no insight into how women think? The character development was poor, I still don't know how old their children were, or why these people were married for so long before they had kids or how they supported themselves so royally when there is Universal Health Care in Britain...Trust me, people do not have personality transfusions and then continue to be just as selfish by giving away his children's posessions and inviting smelly homeless men into their home, the husband didn't change one iota, he was exactly the same, only under the guise of being a liberal. Is this a story people want to read? I think not. I am very disappointed in an author who I have found to be funny and failsafe in the past. This book was stupid and pathetic.
Rating:
Summary: So boring, I gave up trying to be good.
Review: Wow, the star ratings are way (way) too generous. I guess readers are trying to be good. I kept plunging forward because I liked "About A Boy" so much, but this book was so poorly plotted that it plodded. Do not buy or read this book. It's a waste of time. There is nothing interesting about the main character and the whole time I kept thinking that Hornby made a mistake by not making the husband the main character. She describes him as someone who makes people laugh. Not that we see it demonstrated but the wife (main character)certainly doesn't make anyone laugh. I also kept thinking the story was going one direction but then it just completely dead ends, as opposed to having a nifty change of direction. If fact, Hornby sometimes wraps up the plot direction with a quick paragraph (as in how the whole homeless children plot pans out) as if he's just as bored with that direction as I was. This book feels like a contractural obligation from Hornby, not a book of passion.
Rating:
Summary: Nick Nornby is a great writer but not with this one
Review: Buy High Fidelity or about a boy, but stay away fom this junk. Unfortunately, the only way you'll confirm that I'm right is to read it. And that's too bad.
Rating:
Summary: Good, but not that good
Review: I wouldn't call this book literature, more like a "good read." It's fairly minimalistic, and frequently reads like a screenplay at times. I found it interesting 1) because English suburbia is almost indistinguishable from American suburbia in most respects and 2) how (somewhat sadly) English suburbia has been infiltrated by American culture (half of the cultural references are American). Otherwise I found the book very gripping, and honestly couldn't put it down until I finished, but there were some weaknesses: 1) the voice of Katie, the heroine, didn't quite seem authentic (I kept fretting over whether the author, a male, really could write the real perspective of the suburban wife) and 2) some scenes were blatantly unrealistic, even shallow, particularly those involving "GoodNews" and the son Tom. It would have been much better if GoodNews didn't get his "hot hands," or if Tom didn't speak like a 40-year old. I guess the main thing that annoyed me was that I kept thinking of Robin Williams in the GoodNews role, and wondering what female actress would play Katie and actually find that it would help her career. . . . things I don't really don't like to think about when reading a book.
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