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Recent Reviews
Kazim Ali
Rave Hippocampus There are many powerful lines that hint at an interiority that is never fully breached ... The book ends, beautifully, where it begins. At first, I found myself wishing that some of the answers we get in the final pages had come sooner. Then I was reminded of how deeply I have been trained to read for the Western arc of a story, with its conflict and resolution. What Ali does, often imperceptibly, is to decolonize this structure. His story is cyclical, like the rhythms of the land and the water that are both backdrop to and main characters in his story ... will push you to consider what home means to you. It evokes the transformative power of revisiting a place from your past in order to reencounter yourself.
Thrity Umrigar
Positive The Boston Globe As with the fictional article that begins the book, Umrigar’s strength as a writer is most potent in individual scenes that distill these tensions. Just as the arc of the story builds to a crescendo, both in its hastening action surrounding the trial of Meena’s brothers and the reader’s understanding of Smita’s history, so do smaller moments ... The many layers that comprise \'Honor\' unfurl like a peak season peony ... [a] beautiful conclusion.
Sigrid Nunez
Rave The Boston Globe ... beautifully layered ... This conversational tone, coupled with quick pacing, make it easy to be drawn in ... It is quite a time to be reading a book about facing mortality, and there are other eerie echoes of our current situation ... With every story, readers remove a matryoshka head to reveal another, even more brightly painted one, underneath. Each layer embodies the notion that what is most personal is most universal. There is even a chapter that is partially narrated, or imagined to be, by a cat ... It can be disorienting that all of the stories are filtered through the voice of the narrator, with quotation marks rarely employed. This heightens the powerful way that cycles — of love, and death, and everything in between — propel the narrative. Readers are left to think about their own stories and how they might be retold by others. Like transparencies used on old overhead projectors, the narrator’s retellings bring her points into relief. Stacked all together, the parts that differ are clearly revealed ... At points, readers’ attention to any given sub-story may waver, guided by their own proclivities and lived experiences. This may also be influenced by the ways the stories bleed together, with narrator as raconteur. At the same time, what is left untold comes to define the story just as much as the moments where we are given a little too much of the mundane ... In the end, Nunez leaves some of the reader’s biggest questions unanswered. What matters, as with Weil’s question that opens the book, is the asking. In doing so, meaning is made. The narrator, and in turn the reader, are transformed.
Karen Tei Yamashita
Positive The Boston Globe As a nisei who speaks Japanese and has not read Austen since college two decades ago, I struggled to access some stories and was easily carried away by others ... Yamashita poignantly contrasts [Marie] Kondo’s joy in discarding to live in the \'here and now,\' with the critical importance of looking back, despite the accompanying pain, and holding on. At the crux of the entire collection rests a tension between the need to shed, and the idea that \'keeping the stuff, saving it, might also be a way of transforming your life\' ... Sansei and Sensibility challenges and delights, while laying bare the familial loyalties we work to preserve and eschew.