PositiveNPR... moves in shutterclicks, shifting points of view and moments in time. The experience of reading it is a compulsively absorbing confusion. Straightforward answers are not forthcoming. The reader assembles what remains of the history of Vandermeer\'s world by gestalt, layering snatches of imagery one on top of another. Yet the book is profoundly emotional. Each character voice is compelling, brutal, rooted in emotional experience. Dead Astronauts is capable of making a reader grieve a kaleidoscope — or a sentient moss.
Elizabeth Hand
MixedNPR... chiefly compelling for its smart, streetwise, complicated protagonist, teenage Pin — and for the careful and vivid evocation of Pin\'s Chicago circa 1915, with all of its sordid glories ... serves as a fictional version of the events that could have inspired Darger\'s obsessive work. It is therefore obsessed with Darger\'s obsessions — and that is where Curious Toys gets itself into trouble it does not need to be in ... the delightful evocation of Chicago and the truly excellent and exciting pacing and prose in this book do not do enough to make up for its shortcomings. Most clearly and frustratingly, the serial killer is revealed to be a cross-dressing carnival showman, Max. He\'s referred to throughout the book as \'She-Male,\' presumably after the name of his half-man-half-woman act — it\'s a period-appropriate epithet, certainly, but winceworthy. Worse is the inevitable association of pedophilia with cross-dressing that this choice of identity for the killer implies. I was profoundly disappointed by the lack of forethought on Hand\'s part, especially considering the complexity of her Chicago and her otherwise careful handling of racial and gender biases in the 1910s ... in combination with the cross-dressing serial killer Max, Pin\'s cross-dressing-while-butch reads as a condemnation of genderqueerness: Max is both male and female, and horrific; while Pin is cisgendered and righteous ... Hand has let Darger\'s obsessions run away with the story and not been careful enough with her characterizations to avoid a truly unpleasant aftertaste.
Silvia Moreno-Garcia
PositiveNPR... is at its witty, compelling, and merciless best when it is fully rooted in its setting, a perfectly organic combination of 1920s Jazz Age Mexico and the Mayan mythological text, the Popol Vuh ... the pleasure of seeing Mayan mythology underlying what at first seems to be a straightforward rendition of the Cinderella trope adds immediate interest to Moreno-Garcia\'s work. Nevertheless, for the first few chapters of Gods of Jade and Shadow, the dominant tone is that of the basic fairy-tale retelling, and while Casiopeia\'s anger, frustration, and family entanglements are all well-drawn, they are nothing particularly special. The book comes into itself the moment Casiopeia is entangled with Hun-Kamé ... does not offer easy or simple answers. It dazzles, instead, showing the reader a world that seems entirely inevitable, a Mexico of the 1920s that would naturally be infused with Precolumbian magic ... effervescent and surprising ... a dispatch from a universe where indigenous American legends have always been part of the lexicon of fantasy. That universe gets closer to being ours every day, and we are better for it.
Rebecca Roanhorse
RaveNPRWidening is a characteristic feature of Storm of Locusts. There is a widening of scope ... Roanhorse also accomplishes a widening of emotional range ... It pushes the reader to think about the struggles of being not quite of one people and not quite of another, the problems of not ever really being able to come home to a home that was stolen from you as a child. In this exploration, Storm of Locusts is a triumphant book—one which weaves fundamental questions of assimilation and diaspora into a fast-paced, action-filled adventure that puts a completely Indigenous spin on the post-apocalyptic Wild West narrative ... Sharp, exciting, dramatic, and entirely rooted in a Navajo sensibility which is both strikingly new to the genre and should have been with us all along.
Victor Lavalle
PositiveNPR\"As a whole, the collection challenges the ideas of who the people of the future United States might be—and therefore also challenges assumptions about who the people of the United States are now. While not every story here is equally strong, the best of them all have small acts of defiance and connections between the marginalized at their hearts ... A People\'s Future of the United States is not a simple read, nor a comfortable one. It begins from the premise that our current precarious situation will almost certainly get much worse. But within all of the futures contained here, there remain people, people whose marginalizations, whose existence on the edges of what some ideologies would think of as America, have given them profound depths of resilience. These futures are not easy. But they show us how we too might find ways to live, and live well, no matter what is coming.\
