RaveThe Los Angeles Review of Books... a book I would recommend to President Trump in particular, though of course he wouldn’t read it ... brilliant, blistering ... as bracing an analysis of post-2016 America as any I have read. Grandin’s book is so sharply argued, so rooted in careful historical detail, so morally clear, that it makes a strong claim to be the most essential political text yet to emerge from the shock of Trump’s election ... One essential use of a historical analysis like Grandin’s is to reopen inquiry into lost possibilities, to pay attention to what the present has muted, to discover the hand of contingency in what is treated as inevitable.
Claire Vaye Watkins
PositiveThe Los Angeles Review of BooksWatkins is the author of a much-praised collection of stories, Battleborn, and the best stories in that collection radiated with an apocalyptic shimmer and ghost-town obsession. Gold Fame Citrus reads less like a departure from these concerns than an intensification of them ... the novel seems to find its surest footing and most gripping pace when Ray’s narration crashes up alongside [Luz's], when we’re liberated from Luz’s cordoned-off psyche and become critical observers of, rather than inhabitors of, her self-protective distance ... To read Watkins’s novel against this current climatological landscape is a bracing, brutal experience. Intriguingly, Gold Fame Citrus seldom expresses a sense of nostalgia or elegy for a lost California — it’s a book too wised-up for that, plunging instead into a brave and bitter nihilism that pushes back against thoughts of easy redemption.
