PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewYour Driver Is Waiting is at its best when Guns shows the monotony of Damani’s daily toil and satirizes the exploitation and indignity that come with her work ... Your Driver Is Waiting is an ambitious project, taking on performative ally-ship, racial discrimination and the class system all at once. It would be challenging for a veteran author to weave together theory and story, moving seamlessly between the two, while maintaining a cast of fully realized characters. Guns’s inaugural endeavor may sacrifice some nuance for message — but it will no doubt resonate with readers, particularly those who see their own struggles in Damani’s.
Kirstin Chen
RaveNew York Times Book ReviewSeemingly, what you see is what you get — a con artist story, a pop-feminist caper, a fashionable romp. Fun! Pass the popcorn. Except nothing in this novel is what it seems ... Make no mistake, Counterfeit is an entertaining, luxurious read — but beneath its glitz and flash, it is also a shrewd deconstruction of the American dream and the myth of the model minority ... Readers love a twist and I won’t spoil this one by revealing too much, but Chen is up to something innovative and subversive here. She uses the device to flip Asian and Asian American stereotypes inside out and upside down ... You can decide for yourself whether Counterfeit is a tale of genuine American gumption or not. Either way, you must grapple with the question: If the dream itself is a false promise, why not achieve it through fakery?
Charles D'Ambrosio
RaveEsquireD\'Ambrosio won the Whiting Writers\' award in 2006, the Lannan in 2008, and is probably well on his way to penning an acceptance speech for a MacArthur Genius grant—but don\'t let that intimidate you. His writing is all guts and heart ... In one essay he sets out to try to eat some gray whale with the Makah of Neah Bay, Washington. He doesn\'t end up scoring any whale, but he does prop open the hood of his truck, pull out the dipstick, burn the excess oil off in the fire, and skewer a salmon to cook ... This man is not the product of an East Coast prep school, in case you hadn\'t noticed ... If you look closely, you\'ll notice that most of these essays are about fathers, sons, brothers, uncles—about being a man—while on the surface, they might expound the solid good of a Coleman lantern. At one point in the collection, D\'Ambrosio asks: What is real? What is trustworthy? The answer: these essays.
Jessica Winter
RaveThe New York Times Book Review...a funny and moving commentary on that point in a woman’s life when everything seems to come into question ... Anyone who’s ever worked in an office inundated with phoniness, passive aggression and a communication style heavy on duplicity will get a kick out of Winter’s sendup ... Even the heaviest scenes of financial angst and other tensions go down easily because of the novel’s short, brisk chapters. So does Winter’s writing style, which is full of tightly packed sentences that build on themselves, often ending in a kicker.
