PositiveAustin ChronicleWith haltingly realistic depictions, rebuking magical realism or the over-romanticization of human-animal connection, Atwood explores the instinctual drives of human nature ... As Atwood leaps from one moment in Lucy’s life to another, she captures painfully relatable snippets of experience and frustrating disconnects candidly ... With the peculiar grace given to wild creatures, Atwood allows Lucy’s motives to remain muddled and unresolved, understandable yet inexplicable.
RaveThe Austin ChronicleUnferth excavates humanity from ashen ruins, celebrating our capacity for connection and curiosity ... She finds a near-mystical perspective in considering other realms of existence. Unferth’s writing style is economical yet expansive, unspooling omniscient jokes and somersaulting from one point of view into another with practiced dexterity. She takes readers through existential frameworks and into the perspectives of modified tardigrades and \'soul globules\' with matter-of-fact imagination ... Her prose has no patience for sugarcoating, nor oversentimentality. There is hope, yes, and love throughout this book, but they are not starry-eyed, world-healing forces. The resilience and tenderness found here are stubborn, scarred emotions that coexist with beaten-down apathy and weary realism and are all the more believable for it.
RaveAustin ChronicleFull of DeLillo-style, mundane-yet-astute observations that revel in the joys and perils of modern ridiculousness ... With an air of Tom Robbins’ whimsy and a touch of Joy Williams’ psalms for the new world, Dwelling is lighthearted in its catastrophizing and non-prescriptive in its resolution. When the housing market gives you a shoe, make do.
