PositiveThe RumpusShapland is meticulous and shines when she loses herself in her material. Her project of proof-finding defies the historical trend of demanding explicit records of sexual encounters to even acknowledge a woman’s queerness in favor of a stranger, more personal methodology: embodiment.
Andrea Long Chu
PositiveThe RumpusChu built up an internet following with frank essays about trans identity, and she brings the same hybrid of cultural criticism and personal experience to Females ... Are we our own gender, a subset of women who want to attract other women, or are we any female who loves a female knowingly, so anyone could become a lesbian if only they would acknowledge that part of themselves? I long to ask Andrea, who spends little time defining the word in her book. I’m not complaining, though. In just ninety-four short pages, Chu manages to show off her quick wit and deep knowledge of everything from pop culture to social history to queer theory.
Amanda Lee Koe
MixedThe RumpusThough the resulting portrait of their lives is rich with historical detail, the reader is rarely able to get any closer to the women than the photographer was on that fateful day ... Koe uses her careful lens to capture these women when their masks are dropped ... The set design and the cinematography of this cinematic novel are exquisitely drawn. Koe stuffs her novel to the gills with historical set pieces, some enchanting, some unsettling ... Koe deftly pans between distinct time periods and perspectives, zooming in on each woman three times throughout the narrative, always in a different order. Even without a linear through line, the novel picks you up and propels you forward as you root for each woman to succeed in chasing her dreams ... With her crisp, clean prose Koe has created a beautiful silver screen surface but gives the reader little access to what is going on inside the minds and hearts of her protagonists ... This emotional remove from the characters makes the romantic encounters less sexy, devoid of anticipation or foreplay ... It is Koe’s secondary characters, fictional yet representative of people forgotten to the annals of history, who act as foils to these impenetrable women and who truly shine, filing the book’s scenes with their light ... Yet even these more down to earth characters often seem as distant as stars in the sky ... If I wanted to know how the world saw these three stars, I would have picked up a history book. I picked up a novel because I wanted to imagine the pieces of them lost to history, to witness their doubts and desires, confusions and frustrations, to see them set free.
Valeria Luiselli
PanThe Rumpus\"Luiselli’s novel, and the novel within the novel, are so carefully constructed that it begins to echo and rhyme. A surprising shift in the narration creates a resonant repetition that further interrogates whose perspectives are privileged in traditional storytelling. But this deep attention to structure holds the reader at a distance, putting calculated parallels ahead of its characters’ emotional journeys ... One of the rare places where the novel has an emotional spark is in its depiction of what Luiselli calls \'the savage daily ritual of being married\' ... Lost Children Archive is a novel written with the eye of an essayist, each moment dissected rather than lived. It’s like a road trip in its own right, meandering, sometimes filled with absorbing, delicious conversation, sometimes haunted by the nagging question, How much further to the end?\
Melissa Broder
PositiveThe Rumpus\"Broder is a pro at writing cringe-worthy sex scenes that explore the boundaries of consent, but her true talent is documenting the unsung anxious rituals that sometimes surround dating ... It would be easy to dismiss Lucy as a foil for Broder and to write them both, author and character alike, off as insufferable. Lucy’s uncomfortable confessions match Broder’s essay collection So Sad Today in their frantic key, and some of the novel’s dialogue even matches the conversations she documents in her nonfiction ... Yet Broder has Lucy confess to the things so many of us spend our lives trying to hide that it is a relief to see them finally reflected back on the page ... Broder opens up a fantastical vein to offer a glimpse at how we might find each other again. Like her poetry and her essays, her first foray into fiction shows that she is unashamed to look directly at how unflattering desire can make us and how unruly our bodies can be, all to reassure us that we aren’t, after all, alone.\
