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Recent Reviews
Alice Hoffman
Positive The Washington Post Alice Hoffman's The Red Garden is a dreamy, fabulist series of connected stories set in Blackwell, Mass., a small town in the Berkshires ...subsequent stories tell of more such women. Most are accompanied by a date... Individual tragedies are offset by Hoffman's penchant for fairy-tale syntax and events ... Hoffman's consciously simple style transforms people's pain into mythic parable. The morals of these stories are satisfying, particularly the endings, which add just the right combination of finality and resonance... Lulling and thought-provoking, she conjures soothing places where readers, like the children to whom we tell fairy tales, can learn with pleasure.
Jess Walter
Rave The Cleveland Plain Dealer Jess Walter's Beautiful Ruins shows novelists how it is done. The last third of this novel catapults it from being a great read to being darn near profound … Tursi and Moray wonder about the German soldier who must have painted the girl, and how much he loved her, and whether he survived the war. What was his story, and how did it end? Walter tells us the answer in the book's elegiac final chapter, which, like our lives, is an act of imagination and a conclusion that does not conclude. The final third may still be a problem for us, living in reality, but not for Walter, in this beautiful novel.
Howard Jacobson
Rave The Barnes & Noble Review The characters spend a lot of time talking about Gaza, swastikas, and ‘never forgetting.’ As you keep reading, however, the brilliance of the book comes clear: Jacobson is using the novel form precisely in order to help us limn these polarizing issues through the consciousness of a flawed character as an excuse,freeing himself—and us—from the conventions of argumentation … Rare is a work of fiction that takes on the most controversial issues facing Jews so directly—and with enough humor,intelligence, and insight—that it changes a reader’s mind or two. Be warned: The Finkler Question will probably distress you on its way to disarming you. Can we pay a novel any greater compliment?
Claire Messud
Mixed The Cleveland Plain Dealer Claire Messud's latest novel, The Woman Upstairs, is beautifully written … But the novel also has pretensions of being a ‘social novel’ about the obstacles to women becoming successful artists, and unfortunately, Messud is unable to make this theme rise to the level of her pretty prose … The Shahids enchant Nora into believing desire and creativity are possible after all. Nora remains thwarted though. When Sirena and Nora rent a studio together, Nora gets back to making art – but she makes tiny reproductions of women artists' rooms … The ideas in the novel are important. But a middle-class white ‘woman upstairs’ – single, childless and invisible – is not new territory.
Philipp Meyer
Rave The Los Angeles Review of Books [The Son] includes scandalous interracial affairs, estranged sons, rich people without scruples and, always, someone stealing someone else’s property. Meyer manages to combine ‘sprawling beach read’ (or, as the back cover description puts it, ‘an epic multigenerational saga of power, blood, and the taming of the frontier’) with an incisive history of a complex, distasteful, fascinating Texas … Meyer gives us vivid historical fiction in all its granular detail, making gripping what one would assume boring and doing for, say, Comanche weapons what Melville did for whales.