RaveThe Masters ReviewBrown includes wisps of scenes, piled together, to create a compelling story about race in England. Brown’s work showcases what Claudia Rankine calls microaggressions with profound intellect and has created a Woolfian novel about them. The endless baderging of being Black in a White corporate world, having to deliver diversity speeches to schoolchildren, being treated as someone with money, but not wealth. The novel works very well ... Race, class and gender are encapsulated in a beautiful way in Assembly ... If Assembly has a flaw, it’s that it is a novel in defiance of story. Our main narrator is not named. She is not fleshed out. She is, in some ways, a device: a symbol to show how racism affects many of this demographic: successful, Black women ... A good novel allows us to question ourselves from every angle and Assembly does this brilliantly.
Claire Boyles
PositiveThe Masters ReviewThese are stories not just of the environment, but humans and one another. Boyles is writing about the ecosystems that form our lives. The natural events that shape us. She asserts: the land matters ... Boyles writes beautifully ... There is a feeling of eco-shame in the book: We should feel bad for what we have done to our environment. But there is also a sense of hope ... Site Fidelity calls on us to change. It asks us to reimagine our relationship, our duty to the landscapes of our lives ... This is a book for readers who understand that we have caused rapid weather cycling, warmer temperatures, melting ice caps, etc. This book is for the modern library. A library that does not ignore this truth, but instead embraces it.
