RaveThe Border ChronicleTurns conventional wisdom about the borderlands on its head ... I would wager that the historical events narrated in Now I Surrender will be unfamiliar to nearly all of the book’s readers ... Yet if the West is indeed the unconscious of the United States, this history is already buried within us. Every American—in the continental sense of the word—needs to learn this past.
RaveThe Southwest ReviewIt’s only through understanding the historical cycles that shaped her past that Rivera Garza can make sense of the fears and longings that haunt her present. In Autobiography of Cotton, she lays out a method for the rest of us to undertake the same excavation.
PositiveThe New RepublicChilco’s imagistic and documentary structure, its radical mixture of poetry and fiction, is held together by the novel’s emphasis on the ecology of the island.
