‹ Reviewer Book Marks

Cristina Henriquez

Rave The Star Tribune \"The novel balances the history with the storytelling as it excavates the connections among these intersecting narratives. Readers will care about these characters even as they learn such things as the segregationist practices that privileged workers from the United States ... Henríquez\'s smart writing starts at the choices made on a national level but it concentrates on the consequences for towns and families when the hole of the canal causes so many other losses. This absorbing novel expresses the experiences of those often overlooked by dominant narratives, and The Great Divide creatively reminds readers of a different way to ground our histories and stories.\

Nicole Chung

Positive The Star Tribune She focuses on the tenuousness of her family\'s financial resources and access to health care while acknowledging the commonality of her story ... The narrative moves logically and emotionally, laying out what the reader needs even when jumping across generations ... The associations work naturally, adding the necessary historical connections or the wisdom of hindsight while also exposing the echoes and lessons lost or learned ... Chung candidly brings readers into her life like they are old friends. There is an ease in her manner of storytelling, and because of that there is joy in each familial connection and a great deal of pain when things go awry.

Ling Ma

Rave The Star Tribune ... insightful, showing readers the darkness of our time but delivering it with an astute approach that often becomes surreal ... Ma gets right, both here and throughout her collection, the way that the absurd can highlight reality ... thoughtful, funny and haunting, similar to those moments during sleep that you aren\'t sure are a dream, a nightmare, or a warped reflection of the day ... The book also displays a smart awareness of structure. This beautifully written collection contains multiple metanarrative moments when an element of the story\'s construction is revealed ... The engaging stories in this collection are linked by theme but each piece also stands on its own. Bliss Montage was a joy to read even as it announced the problems of our reality — and, really, because of this discernment. The book is filled with echoes and illusions, yetis and drugs.

Julie Otsuka

Rave The Star Tribune There is a minimalism to Julie Otsuka\'s work. The sentences in her slim books dive right into the details ... another artfully refined story, even when it delves into the most painful parts of life ... The book\'s chapters build upon each other but also hold the pleasure of complete, distinct stories ... Otsuka beautifully renders the particularities of a life fully using every word, including the pronouns. She has a way of presenting seemingly objective details, but the emotions seep through the minutiae so that we know and feel much about Alice and those who care for her. With virtuosity, Otsuka hands us each crystallized inch of this tale that reflects a life — the pages memorialize what can\'t be forgotten.

Julia Fine

Rave The Boston Globe In this gripping and stylistically impressive novel, Fine illustrates how the rational and the mythic, the tangible and intangible, intertwine to fully tell a woman’s story ... As a follow-up to Fine’s first novel, What Should Be Wild, a feminist fairy tale, The Upstairs House gives readers another gynocentric narrative with otherworldly elements ... The Upstairs House is constantly aware of sliding between reality and fiction, between the historical and the strange, and how that in-between movement can be both productive and destructive ... With style and imagination, Fine renders the world of women more believably than the writing in many strictly realistic novels. While eventually there are some direct solutions in this book, much remains unsettled, which feels accurate, frightening, and a bit magical.

Gish Jen

Positive The Star Tribune This book is narrated by Grant, whose first-person point of view replicates the invasive, spying atmosphere that pervades the novel. Access to Eleanor and Gwen’s thoughts would add to the narrative’s complexity, but Jen world-builds effortlessly. Newly coined words become part of your own parlance within pages as you come to understand this world ... Jen takes us on an entertaining ride in a new yet familiar world as we contemplate that \'it was we who made our world what it was. It was we who were responsible.\'

Carmen Maria Machado

Rave Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House is a difficult book ... a researched text that fills in gaps of the archives that often fail to preserve the fully lived and complicated accounts of lesbian relationships. As she crafts the details, this book is a humorous (and not so humorous) compilation of footnotes on motifs from folktales that apply to her life ... Overall, it is a tour de force that demonstrates the many tools that Carmen Maria Machado wields as a writer. This is a difficult book and a glorious one. The book begins with a piling up of epigraphs, page after page, keeping the reader from the official start of the story ... Even as the tone of each section resets for a new trope, there is also a strong underlying narrative that carries the reader throughout. Of course, because of the risks of this type of artistic variability, some of these section titles are more remarkable in how they are integrated into the style of the segment than others. When they work best, they add a force to the whole chapter ... Each rendering kept me rapt ... She nimbly uses language so that the full weight of the words creeps quietly upon you each time.

Edwidge Danticat

Positive The St. Louis Post-Dispatch [Danicat] is very much in control of her deft structures that often introduce the main action early in each tale ... a book about personal relationships and the world that intervenes. By introducing us to characters who have lived through dictatorships, the devastating Haitian earthquake of 2010, the United States’ restrictive immigration laws, or who are merely tourists hearing about another’s past, Danticat reminds us of the lasting effects of these events on all of our interactions ... Good historians like Danticat illustrate the importance of learning from our past and one another.

Sarah M. Broom

Rave Pittsburgh Post-Gazette The Yellow House is a meandering and engaging history, captivating us as it covers vast terrain ... this work is more than a personal memoir. It is a mapping of a place and of a family, moving beyond the literal representation of space into the inner dimensions of the Brooms’ world, functioning as both an intimate and cultural history ... With the images, she creates the intimacy of flipping through a photo album, and she allows the people who experienced events to dictate the history ... The matriarch guides. This means that Sarah Broom is intentionally yielding part of the story to her sources ... Ms. Broom herself is adept at rendering the material world so that it exposes larger, symbolic implications ... Though the shifts between chapters can be momentarily jarring, those changes in topic are also this book’s strength ... We need more memoirs like this.

Colson Whitehead

Rave The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette ... grips us from the very first line ... invoke[s] a Toni Morrison-esque poetic simplicity that speaks to a toxic past that continues to haunt us ... Some believe they can bury the past, but The Nickel Boys reveals the value and pain of such unearthing of our untold histories and our traumatized soil ... Whitehead’s striking language helps us to feel the enduring nature of these boys and their experiences, and these sidelined black teens see that even respectability politics cannot keep them safe when the system is structured to keep them down ... Whitehead’s haunting prose and position as one of our most formidable contemporary writers takes us there and back for a reckoning.

Crystal Hana Kim

Rave The Millions Kim’s work makes the desires and concerns of the destructive United States a distant background to the full rendering of South Korea and its local inhabitants during and after the Korean War. This book is no narrative of triumphal imperialism or essentialized nationalism; Kim alters the expectations of the genre to include a much stronger focus on women and the multigenerational cultural changes that occur in and after a war caused by a global power struggle ... The book is situated in a clearly defined historical context of what is often labeled in the U.S. as the Forgotten War, but that history is told from the outlook of those living through the experience; the details aren’t spoon-fed ... This is a grand, sweeping story that proves that an epic can yield strong, individualized characters while still developing a nuanced perspective that refuses to essentialize war, women, or national identity ... The novel impressed me in ways I wasn’t expecting.

Rebecca Makkai

Rave Kenyon Review \"The writing in this novel is lovely ... In addition to the power of individual lines, there is a power in the surprising tension that builds through the story ... The stories overlap because of the bond between the two main characters of Fiona and Yale from the start, but Makkai finds clever ways to keep those connections growing between not just the two of them, but also among them and characters like Nora and Nico, Fiona’s brother ... This is a book about loss, but it is also about a sense of continuance through the stories we tell, their tellers, and the lessons we learn from them. Those lost will remain in the minds of these characters and, now, in the minds of the reader. The Great Believers is devastating and beautiful, and very worth remembering.\

Get the Book Marks Bulletin

December 16 – 20, 2024