PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewDisciples of brisk prose may grow impatient with Beaird’s participle-rich constructions and her penchant for simile, but the abundance of descriptive detail brings alive both the divorcées and the desert landscape in which they’re mired ... In Beaird’s painstakingly constructed world, there are no decent men or decent marriages, and you’d best not rely on the other women, either.
Kristin Hannah
RaveNew York Times Book ReviewHannah takes up the Vietnam epic and re-centers the story on the experience of women ... Hannah is in top form here, plunging the reader into the chaotic miseries of the combat zone. She deploys details to visceral effect.
Susanna Hoffs
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewA total knockout ... Hoffs hits the familiar beats of romantic comedy with such panache and gusto, every note feels fresh. Preposterous plot twists are child’s play in the impulsive hands of Jane, whose fertile, febrile curiosity and pixie exuberance propel her into decisions ranging from the questionable to the catastrophic ... There is not a spare, bare sentence to be found. Instead, the pages are packed with wit and sly allusion and dialogue that strikes the ear just so, with song references that tended to skim pleasantly over my head, though I got the gist ... I had a literary quibble or two at the beginning, but by the time I’d torn through to the gratifying end — sucked into Jane’s world by force of storytelling, to say nothing of the pitch-perfect delivery of contemporary British idiom — I’d forgotten what they were. The odd cliché here, an extraneous adverb there. Who cares, when you’re having this much fun? This Bird Has Flown is the smart, ferocious rock-chick redemption romance you didn’t know you needed. My husband is devouring it now.
Ann Leary
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewLeary doesn’t pull any Gothic punches ... Leary is in full command as the story spirals to the kind of harrowing climax — blizzard raging, phone lines cut — that forces Mary to stake her moral ground ... Leary’s first historical novel, and she has all the right instincts, by which I mean she inhabits Mary without modern conceit. Yes, the speakeasy slang and the gin fizzes are there, but any competent hack can recreate the sounds and sights of the past. Leary does something more daring — she asks you to root for a protagonist who comes equipped with the orthodoxies of her own day. Engle isn’t some magically enlightened dream girl who sheds the pixie dust of contemporary social justice on the benighted bigots of yesteryear. She is on a journey, as we say, which gives her moment of reckoning its power. If The Foundling lacks the sly, delicious wit of Leary’s previous books, it’s only because Leary is such a virtuoso that she doesn’t indulge herself at the expense of Mary’s characterization ... arrests us precisely because its antagonist comes cloaked in the good intentions of progressive social reform. Leary pins her cautionary tale on the portrait of Vogel herself and her iron conviction that she’s doing the right thing.
