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  • The Lincoln Highway: A New York Times Number One Bestseller
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Customer reviews

4.3 out of 5 stars
4.3 out of 5
37,185 global ratings
5 star
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4 star
29%
3 star
11%
2 star
3%
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The Lincoln Highway: A New York Times Number One Bestseller

The Lincoln Highway: A New York Times Number One Bestseller

byAmor Towles
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Gadgetgirl
5.0 out of 5 starsA wonderful read
Reviewed in Australia on 13 January 2022
Such an “escapade” is the Lincoln Highway! Beautifully drawn characters are the young men and boy whose tales are intertwined. With the intention of travelling the highway to San Francisco as envisioned by young Billy, in search of the mother of him and Emmet, the pair are sidetracked through the actions of the other young men and find themselves heading for New York. The journey with them is full of action and snippets of homespun wisdom. Do take the journey with them.
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Top critical review

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Morgan
3.0 out of 5 starsAn American Tradition - The Road
Reviewed in Australia on 15 October 2021
The road has mythic status in American literature beginning with the Oregon Trail and moving through each generation's incarnations. Towles' book leans heavily on the tradition and has Towles' trademark fascination with style which gives the book both its strengths and weaknesses. Strength - nothing can dent the ease of the prose and the movement of the narrative but its weaknesses are its obvious indebtedness to Steinbeck, Charles Portis and the Coen brothers. The picaresque form demands a virtuous protagonist but Emmet is perhaps a little too good. I found it didn't reach the heights of A Gentleman in Moscow and Duchess began to irritate long before the end. Perhaps that's intentional. Even so it irked this reader and the holy innocent Wooly just made me want to slap him.

Aside from the preciousness of some characters one minor fault began to grate on me like sand in a sneaker - the author's reliance of a blow to the head "'.. and then everything went dark.... when he awoke...' to advance the narrative. I don't care if it's meant to be a trope or simply lazy writing but the amateur neurologist in me began counting the blows and wondering why at least one of the bodies slumping to the ground wasn't permanently brain damaged or dead. Hitting somebody on the head with a shovel doesn't give a convenient brief coma. It kills them and leaves them looking like a frog.

Aside from these caveats I enjoyed the book but my heart belongs back in Moscow.
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From Australia

Morgan
3.0 out of 5 stars An American Tradition - The Road
Reviewed in Australia on 15 October 2021
Verified Purchase
The road has mythic status in American literature beginning with the Oregon Trail and moving through each generation's incarnations. Towles' book leans heavily on the tradition and has Towles' trademark fascination with style which gives the book both its strengths and weaknesses. Strength - nothing can dent the ease of the prose and the movement of the narrative but its weaknesses are its obvious indebtedness to Steinbeck, Charles Portis and the Coen brothers. The picaresque form demands a virtuous protagonist but Emmet is perhaps a little too good. I found it didn't reach the heights of A Gentleman in Moscow and Duchess began to irritate long before the end. Perhaps that's intentional. Even so it irked this reader and the holy innocent Wooly just made me want to slap him.

Aside from the preciousness of some characters one minor fault began to grate on me like sand in a sneaker - the author's reliance of a blow to the head "'.. and then everything went dark.... when he awoke...' to advance the narrative. I don't care if it's meant to be a trope or simply lazy writing but the amateur neurologist in me began counting the blows and wondering why at least one of the bodies slumping to the ground wasn't permanently brain damaged or dead. Hitting somebody on the head with a shovel doesn't give a convenient brief coma. It kills them and leaves them looking like a frog.

Aside from these caveats I enjoyed the book but my heart belongs back in Moscow.
6 people found this helpful
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Levi Huxton
3.0 out of 5 stars A too familiar journey
Reviewed in Australia on 15 May 2022
Verified Purchase
Upon the death of his father from cancer, 18-year-old Emmett Watson is released from a juvenile work farm in Kansas and returns home to small town Nebraska, where he is reunited with his 8-year-old brother, Billy. Given a second a chance, they embark on a journey to a new life, first in the footsteps of their long-gone mother, then in the tyre tracks of their stolen Studebaker.

Amor Towles joins the dots between Tom Sawyer, Steinbeck and Stand By Me and finds it forms a straight line through the American continent and century. The Lincoln Highway exists on this continuum, a tale of Americana in which the open road is an invitation to adventure, wisdom, and redemption.
Encounters along the way serve to prompt and provoke our male protagonists into developing a moral compass, their reactions placing them on a spectrum of fabular archetypes (Billy even carries with him a well-thumbed compendium of heroes). It’s a well-trodden path, in books and road movies, one Towles isn’t keen to stray from. He’s working within a tradition.

Towles is a master storyteller. Even in interviews, he speaks – seemingly off the cuff - in elegant, fully formed sentences that give his thoughts cinematic scope and clarity. This coming-of-age mid-century road trip benefits from this eloquence and facility with language, which carry the reader through over six hundred mostly unsurprising pages, but there only so far you can travel on style alone.

Like about 4 million others, I enjoyed The Rules of Civility and A Gentleman in Moscow, yet this one left me somewhat indifferent. In The Lincoln Highway, the line between mythological quotation and storytelling cliché blurs more than once. Perhaps I don’t feel that nostalgia for the moral certitude of 1950s America, but its old-school conservative world view and trite-adjacent home truths stuck too close to the middle of the road, as it were.
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Levi Huxton
3.0 out of 5 stars A too familiar journey
Reviewed in Australia on 15 May 2022
Upon the death of his father from cancer, 18-year-old Emmett Watson is released from a juvenile work farm in Kansas and returns home to small town Nebraska, where he is reunited with his 8-year-old brother, Billy. Given a second a chance, they embark on a journey to a new life, first in the footsteps of their long-gone mother, then in the tyre tracks of their stolen Studebaker.

Amor Towles joins the dots between Tom Sawyer, Steinbeck and Stand By Me and finds it forms a straight line through the American continent and century. The Lincoln Highway exists on this continuum, a tale of Americana in which the open road is an invitation to adventure, wisdom, and redemption.
Encounters along the way serve to prompt and provoke our male protagonists into developing a moral compass, their reactions placing them on a spectrum of fabular archetypes (Billy even carries with him a well-thumbed compendium of heroes). It’s a well-trodden path, in books and road movies, one Towles isn’t keen to stray from. He’s working within a tradition.

Towles is a master storyteller. Even in interviews, he speaks – seemingly off the cuff - in elegant, fully formed sentences that give his thoughts cinematic scope and clarity. This coming-of-age mid-century road trip benefits from this eloquence and facility with language, which carry the reader through over six hundred mostly unsurprising pages, but there only so far you can travel on style alone.

Like about 4 million others, I enjoyed The Rules of Civility and A Gentleman in Moscow, yet this one left me somewhat indifferent. In The Lincoln Highway, the line between mythological quotation and storytelling cliché blurs more than once. Perhaps I don’t feel that nostalgia for the moral certitude of 1950s America, but its old-school conservative world view and trite-adjacent home truths stuck too close to the middle of the road, as it were.
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From other countries

KasaC
TOP 1000 REVIEWER
3.0 out of 5 stars Wish i'd liked it more
Reviewed in the United States on 10 October 2021
Verified Purchase
I know there were a lot of people who loved this, but after such anticipation, I was disappointed. To me it lacked the magic of Towles's earlier two books, in particular, A Gentleman In Moscow, but then that book set such a high bar. Here, instead of having his central character virtually under house arrest and retaining the narrative to a single setting in "Moscow," Towles hits the open road in 1954 with four characters that made me think of Of Mice & Men by way of Huck Finn. I did like some of the atmospheric choices, such as the Highline decades before it became known as such and was still part of the railway spur that serviced the meatpacking district. But there were too many instances of deus ex machina, too many inconceivable occurrences, I could not suspend belief. I did finish since I was intrigued enough to learn what happens to these people, but was ultimately unsatisfied.
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Jeff
3.0 out of 5 stars Disappointing
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 6 May 2022
Verified Purchase
After the Moscow book which I absolutely loved, I found this one rather a dull uninteresting read.
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bp9
3.0 out of 5 stars Is there a sequel?
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 1 December 2021
Verified Purchase
Rather irritating with constant changes of characters. Disappointing because we saw so little of the Lincoln Highway. Interesting about the Western Elevated Railway in NY.
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Simon Lidington
3.0 out of 5 stars Not enough variation in tone
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 22 November 2021
Verified Purchase
Monotone - a lot of old world verbose, courtly 'types' in this book. Even the 18 year old semi-housetrained Duchess speaks like a Princeton Professor. I enjoyed the book but this made it a bit one-dimensional for my taste.
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ALDI
3.0 out of 5 stars An okay read.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 2 April 2022
Verified Purchase
I didn’t find it as exciting as many others did here.
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Kindle Customer
3.0 out of 5 stars Beautifully written, but...
Reviewed in Canada on 30 November 2021
Verified Purchase
The characters were interesting and fully drawn, the plot line was unusual, but frankly, I found the ending unsatisfying. I can't imagine how else the story could have been brought to a tidy close, but I was disappointed.
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Vijay runganadhan
3.0 out of 5 stars A work of fascinating years in the US
Reviewed in India on 8 February 2022
Verified Purchase
Very well written but sometimes confusing.
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Shirley Morie
3.0 out of 5 stars I liked his other books better....
Reviewed in Canada on 24 January 2022
Verified Purchase
His other works were much better and more enjoyable.
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