RaveNew City LitI would very much like you to read this book for yourself. To entice you further, I will say there are surprises, even beyond the ones I’ve suggested above. This creative novel might just be a corrective for our current moment of absurdity, discontent, alienation and longing.
RaveNew City LitA compelling novel that fills one with an actual physical sense of dread, from the first words on the first page, and yet also offers glimpses of whimsy, beauty, and love ... Achieves this balance, highlighting the warmth and wonder of human existence, while weaving a tale of tragedies, ordinary and extraordinary, that befall its characters ... Inventive ... One source of this book’s power is Knapp’s adept use of surprise and suspense.
Emma Knight
PositiveNew City LitThis is a lively, funny book that reads easily, but there is also a satisfying heaviness of focus on ideas like love, partnership, attachments and choice ... It is to Knight’s credit as a writer that all of these so-pivotal points cohere with each other as harmonically as they do.
Sonia Purnell
RaveNewCityLit\"Like the best biographies, Kingmaker has moments when the story sails along, vibrantly evoking Jazz Age Manhattan, Montmartre, or postwar London; the book is riveting, and, given its subject, at times salacious. Purnell’s confident voice and her citations go a long way to create an air of objectivity amidst a complex history that is not without scandal. There is a cinematic quality to the biography, which reads like a novel—sweeping, swelling ... To step into this five-hundred-page-plus saga is to open the door to a hothouse of opulence and ambition, of Sturm und Drang that can feel exhausting. Yet as we hurtle toward the 2024 presidential election...I can think of no better time to pick up the well-told story of one of the twentieth century’s most powerful female kingmakers.\