PositiveUSA Today... Woodrell knows how to command a reader\'s attention — not so much with plot twists, but with well-built sentences. They can sound almost biblical, if the Bible had been written in the Ozarks ... In a mere 164 pages, Woodrell unravels a literary mystery about love and betrayal amid the haves and have-nots of a small town ... Woodrell\'s writing flows but is never flowery. He has called his novels and short stories \'country noir.\' English professors would call his style poetic realism. Readers will simply fall into the story.
Timothy Egan
PositiveUSA TODAY... a vivid and gritty piece of forgotten history ... Egan re-creates that period by weaving together the stories told by a half-dozen families. That is both the book\'s strength and weakness. It does justice to the range of suffering, but it\'s harder to follow than a novel that would focus on one family ... As Egan\'s extensive source notes make clear, pieces of the story have been told before, although never as comprehensively or as well. It\'s a great read about a horrible time, filled with lessons still worth learning.
Colson Whitehead
PositiveUSA Today\"... bemusing ... The novel is best at capturing the sense of a teenager tasting independence and creating a summer identity away from his prep school ... But if he\'s short on action, Whitehead embroiders his themes with sharp observations on race and popular culture. A few passages are chilling ... Sag Harbor is not as ambitious as Whitehead\'s [previous works] ... It\'s a novel in which the sum is less than the parts, but enough parts make it worthwhile reading.\
David Wroblewski
RaveUSA TodayEdgar is a teenager, but his tragic story deals with grown-up themes: loyalty and betrayal, and the power and limits of words. Wroblewski...lets the dogs in his novel share in the narration, to a small degree. Sounds hokey, but it works remarkably well … The plot, which unfolds slowly, is rooted in rich and realistic details.
Chang-rae Lee
RaveUSA TodayChang-rae Lee's beautifully brutal and sad novel The Surrendered opens with a harrowing scene at the start of the Korean War. But the book is less about war than its aftermath and the kind of scars that never heal ...set in the USA, Korea, China and Europe, moves back and forth in time, slowly reconnecting the intersections of three ruined lives ...a complex story, rich in details, if at times too rich for impatient readers. In the end, it's not just about war's easy brutalities but also the power and limits of love.
David Finkel
RaveUSA TodayFinkel offers a painfully intimate account of what he calls the ‘after war’ for a few of that battalion's survivors [chronicled in The Good Soldiers]. It's not an easy book to read, even if the writing is spare and unadorned. It's filled with details about endless nightmares and suicidal thoughts, anxiety and depression, guilt and shame … It's not an overtly political book. It's more about people than policies. But, by Finkel's account, the military's response to the growing number of suicides and mental-health problems is mostly bureaucratic and ineffective.
Philip Roth
MixedUSA TodayIn a breath-taking leap of imagination, Roth describes what could have happened between 1940 and 1942, after Lindbergh runs and defeats Franklin D. Roosevelt and signs ‘understandings’ with Germany and Japan. Supporters wear buttons that read: KEEP AMERICA OUT OF THE JEWISH WAR … There's much ardor in The Plot Against America. The writing is brilliant when the focus is on the Roths and their neighborhood and what it meant to be a working-class Jew when there were more Jewish gangsters than rich Jews. But Roth lapses into melodrama when he tries to tie up all the loose ends in such a hurry that he fails to explain how another presidential election was held in 1942 … Lindbergh is more a hovering presence than a character.
Colum McCann
RaveUSA TodayOut goes McCann on his own literary tightrope. He weaves an ambitious mosaic, mostly set on that summer day in 1974 … It's a novel rooted firmly in time and place. It vividly captures New York at its worst and best. But it transcends all that. In the end, it's a novel about families — the ones we're born into and the ones we make for ourselves.
Dave Eggers
MixedUSA TodayEggers has said he did no research for the novel. He didn't tour tech campuses. He has said he didn't read books about tech firms because he wanted to write a novel that's not so much about technology, but its implications. That's both the novel's strength and weakness. It's driven by a message, more than its characters … By literary standards, The Circle is not one of his best novels, but for the questions it raises, it could be his most important.
Denis Johnson
RaveUSA TodayIt's a triumph of spare writing that sketches the life of Grainier, a logger and hauler born in 1886, and who dies, in a different world, in 1968 … A small life perhaps, if any life is small. But in a blend of myth and history, Johnson builds a world around Grainier. He's more a survivor than hero, a decent man who once did a bad thing — not that it seemed bad at the time —and once failed to do something he should have done, and never forgot it … Train Dreams is a gem of a story, set in rough times, in a tough terrain, and tenderly told.
Colm Tóibín
RaveUSA TodayColm Tóibín's Brooklyn, about a young Irish woman coming to New York in 1952, is one of those magically quiet novels that sneak up on readers and capture their imaginations … He employs no page-turning plot devices. The only touches of drama and suspense are saved until the end … It's a classic American story about an immigrant's lonely, unspoken yearnings and about feeling ‘this was the only life she was going to have, a life away from home’ … Brooklyn he creates the purest form of fiction, a small world that employs few references to the real world. It transcends time and place. It leaves readers wondering if Eilis is making the right life for herself, the same question we all face.
