MixedThe New York Times Book ReviewFruesome details are fortunately contained to a few chapters. The author focuses more on drawing a portrait of her maternal grandparents, and how they survived this horrific time ... As Ramírez reconstructs past episodes, she has trouble maintaining a steady tone. She can get bogged down in numbers...and use terms that don’t always fit their historical period. It is when she turns to her grandmother’s betrayal by her grandfather that she’s most confident. This is her story to tell ... As a stylist, Ramírez is less sure, alternating between the sort of serviceable prose that keeps a narrative moving but can fall flat, and wispy metaphors and poetic musings ... A brave book.
Alejandro Puyana
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewPuyana has said he grew up watching movies and reading comic books, not literary novels. That tracks: His fast-paced novel is full of foreshadowing, cliffhangers and cartoonish thugs. But Puyana entered adulthood as Chávez took power, and this book is really about politics ... Freedom Is a Feast, both a passionate indictment of Chávez and his cronies and a prelude to the present day, is not a hopeless book.
Nikita Lalwani
MixedNew York TimesShan and Nia are employees who have ended up, separately, at Pizzeria Vesuvio by 2003, both grappling with loss and forcing themselves to begin again. The restaurant and its owner, the enigmatic and generous Tuli, become the fulcrum of their new lives, and of this ambitious if flawed novel ... Lalwani’s concern is the philosophical and moral questions surrounding migration: What is the obligation of those who are \'legal,\' like Tuli and Nia, to those who are not? And how does it feel for undocumented immigrants like Shan to proffer their life stories again and again, in exchange for mercy — or, in the official terminology, asylum? ... These questions are not new, which would have been fine had Lalwani explored them more deeply. Choosing to focus on just one story line instead of many would have delivered a leaner, finer book ... These details of Lalwani’s created reality are more convincing than the overwrought descriptions of the characters’ inner lives ... From its slow beginnings the novel shakes itself off and grows restless in the final third, when the characters are stirred out of their inaction.
