Rating: 
Summary: Powerful journey through the heart of darkness
Review: A good novel keeps you reading; a great one, like Toby-Potter's "The Average Human," keeps you up all night because you can't put it down. For a first novel it is remarkably well done; the characters are each distinct, sympathetic, and understandable. Each of them breathes, thinks, moves in a dark but nonetheless vividly truthful world toward destinies unknown.Is it interesting? Eminently. When I can retain images of landscapes, kitchens, taverns, and faces--that stay with me after I've put the book down--I feel like I've come to know this new world on an intimate level. I only experience that with superior character authors like Richard Russo, Graham Greene, and Stephen King. The language is beautiful; Toby-Potter's prose moves as easily as a summer breeze. Her voice is unique and she creates in a descriptive language all her own. Read this. I have several times. Keep writing, Ms. Toby-Potter.
Rating:
Summary: A stand-out debut novel
Review: Ambitious, dark, atmospheric and sometimes as painful as it is hypnotic, Toby-Potters' first novel focuses a penetrating eye on an insular family of outcasts in rural upstate New York. Characterized by "innocent, irreproachable maliciousness," the Mayborns, once a large, rapacious clan of dairy farmers who absorbed the women and land of their neighbors, have grown increasingly shiftless over the generations. Now nothing is left of their holdings but a house, yard and dog run. Mayborn girls are born with black, shriveled fingernails, which the townspeople consider a mark of the rumored, unspeakable Mayborn sins, including, but not limited to, incest and infanticide. June Mayborn, 14, a pariah among her schoolmates, has fallen into an affair with Ed Cipriano, a shopkeeper whose wife is away. When the wife returns, June pays one last visit to the Cipriano bedroom where her heightened sense of smell assaults her with the stink of all three of them. To purify the air, she lights a fire, which burns the place down, incidentally killing Joseph, the terminally ill tenant in the next room. Toby-Potter manages to arouse both sympathy and repugnance for June. She is too self-absorbed to be pitiable in her loneliness, too amoral and creepy to be likable in her innocence and vulnerability. June is a hard-sell as a protagonist, but the death of Joseph brings some new blood to town. Joseph was guru of a hippie cult, which disintegrated after his affair with Iris, a beauty whose own self-absorbed amorality is more than a match for the Mayborns'. Iris and Joseph's son disappeared while in the care of Iris' young daughter, Lee, and he has never been found. Lee, now June's age, is as grounded as Iris is flighty, and as serious as Iris is hedonistic. When Iris lands in jail for snatching a child she thinks is her missing son, she has Lee put in the care of the Mayborns, her "relatives," a connection Lee flatly rejects until confronted with her sister June's black, twisted fingernails, identical to her own. Now, bereft of belongings and friends, Lee, dressed in June's clothing, feels herself succumbing to the Mayborn pull. Toby-Potter involves half the town in this welter of secrets, misfits and flawed heroes. She handles the large cast well, fleshing out her characters while retaining their mystery, allowing them to reveal themselves. The Mayborns are truly scary - too human to be despised, too brutish to garner sympathy. The story probes and prods and worms its way to a jolting, shocking climax and fitting, plausible resolution. With its gothic atmosphere, sharply drawn characters and flowing, understated prose, this is an impressive debut.
Rating:
Summary: more please!!!
Review: From the first sentence, I was hooked. This book opens with a rich, dark, descriptive force of the collective history of a small town-- especially of the family of "undesirables" at its center. Like all small towns, the life of the people in it becomes more entangled and ambiguous over time. Secrets grow interdependent, and what is truth or lies becomes more a question of perspective than of absolute certainty. In life, as well as in this book, what is often more interesting than secrets themselves is who keeps them and why. Ellen Toby-Potter tells this story in gorgeous language reminiscent of William Faulkner and Carson McCullers, and with equal pathos. Like both of those authors, she also identifies something about the way towns, and families, can become like self-protecting organisms, guarding their guilty members as much as their innocent ones. This book is strange-- strange and multi-faceted in the way people's lives really are. Toby-Potter pulled no punches and did not cave to either moralizing or to trite resolutions. When another author would have underestimated the reader, this one assumes that you have experienced the ambiguity of real relationships: that people's motivations are sometimes complex and unpredictable. In fact, she will even have you rooting, in spite of yourself, for the characters you should despise. What I want to know is, when is the next book coming?
Rating:
Summary: more please!!!
Review: Giving this one star is pushing it. This was positively one of the worst books I have ever read in my life. My advice is to run, not walk, away from this one!! There was no development of characters and truthfully, we are probably better off for it! Additionally, the characters are so unsavory that you can't help despising everyone in the book. I was left counting the pages until it was over. This was a choice for our Book Club and was chosen based on all of the wonderful reviews it received. Six of us left our meeting, scratching our heads, wondering what in the heck we missed here! Somehow I don't believe it was us.............
Rating: 
Summary: Are you kidding me?!?
Review: Giving this one star is pushing it. This was positively one of the worst books I have ever read in my life. My advice is to run, not walk, away from this one!! There was no development of characters and truthfully, we are probably better off for it! Additionally, the characters are so unsavory that you can't help despising everyone in the book. I was left counting the pages until it was over. This was a choice for our Book Club and was chosen based on all of the wonderful reviews it received. Six of us left our meeting, scratching our heads, wondering what in the heck we missed here! Somehow I don't believe it was us.............
Rating: 
Summary: Masterful Writing
Review: Hard to believe this is a first novel by Ms. Toby-Potter. The writing is masterful. Her use of the English language is a pleasure to read. What a feat of imagination.
I am glad I bought the book during a visit to NY last month.
Rating:
Summary: Complex and compelling
Review: I actually read "The Average Human" after first reading the author's book for adolescents, "Olivia Kidney." The two books are not really similar, but the writer's compelling, literary prose is equally excellent in both. The characters in "The Average Human," who live in rural New York State, are complex and not easily understood. Yet they are compellingly drawn and very memorable. Since I read this book, scenes and phrases from it have revisited me frequently. I will certainly read it a second time. Ellen Toby-Potter (or Ellen Potter, which she uses in the "Olivia Kidney" book) is truly a brilliant writer; I look forward to her next works for both young people and adults.
Rating:
Summary: Complex and compelling
Review: I actually read "The Average Human" after first reading the author's book for adolescents, "Olivia Kidney." The two books are not really similar, but the writer's compelling, literary prose is equally excellent in both. The characters in "The Average Human," who live in rural New York State, are complex and not easily understood. Yet they are compellingly drawn and very memorable. Since I read this book, scenes and phrases from it have revisited me frequently. I will certainly read it a second time. Ellen Toby-Potter (or Ellen Potter, which she uses in the "Olivia Kidney" book) is truly a brilliant writer; I look forward to her next works for both young people and adults.
Rating:
Summary: awful
Review: I get so little time to read. This book wasted what little I have.
Rating:
Summary: This novel should be made into a movie
Review: I read this book cover-to-cover in 2 days - I couldn't put it down. Toby-Potter's characters have the kind of quirkiness about them that one finds in an Anne Tyler novel. Her character development is so graphic that I could visualize certain actors in a movie version of this story. (For one, I see Philip Seymour Hoffman cast as Frank.) Toby-Potter's writing is rich and bold throughout this unusual and compelling story. A remarkable first novel.
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