RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewStylistic brio, vivid sociological detail and general air of chutzpah. Trying to summarize it in an 800-word review is like trying to paint a mural on a postage stamp. Suffice it to say, you’re unlikely to read a more impressive first novel this year ... As the novel progresses, it can’t help wobbling under the weight of all it bears. The simultaneous crises of identity feel a bit schematic. And Schaefer is able to bring together his many plotlines only with a heavy application of coincidence. But perhaps plausibility is too stingy a standard for a novel this generous with its wonders ... Wildly ambitious and immensely rewarding.
Daniel Mason
RaveNew York Times Book Review\"Despite its serious concerns, The Winter Soldier brims with improbable narrative pleasures. Mason is a practitioner of storytelling backhandedly praised as “old-fashioned.” In fact, it’s timeless. These pages crackle with excitement — and charging cavalries, false identities, arranged marriages, scheming industrialists and missing persons ... Lucius may fail, but the novel he carries is a spectacular success.\
Sara Novic
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewNovic builds the inner world of Ana’s childhood — as both puberty and paramilitaries loom just over the horizon — with the same vivid detail she gives the blockaded city ... With the stateside setting, both prose and plot occasionally stumble into well-worn territory ... Throughout, Girl at War performs the miracle of making the stories of broken lives in a distant country feel as large and universal as myth. It is a brutal novel, but a beautiful one.
