PositiveThe Washington PostBrown can be faulted for devoting too many pages to the queen’s corgis — their rowdy behavior, their diet and their ancestry. I also found myself skimming the lengthy sections in which people describe dreams they’ve had involving the queen. But otherwise Q: A Voyage Around the Queen remains absorbing, edifying and frequently laugh-out-loud funny.
Dawn Tripp
PositiveThe Washington PostTripp’s wonderful, pointillistic skill with physical description and the deft, empathetic leaps she takes — jumping off from letters, contemporary memoirs and photographs snapped of the former first lady — gives Jackie undeniable emotional punch ... As sensitively rendered as Jackie is, I imagine many of Onassis’s friends and fans rolling their eyes. They won’t applaud Tripp for concocting scenes, inventing dialogue and presuming to know how the real-life woman felt.
Andrew O'Hagan
MixedThe Washington PostWhile O’Hagan’s novel has funny bits, it is fundamentally glum, befitting the time and place of its writing ... Intended as social criticism, it somewhat falls down as fiction. Snappy dialogue can’t rescue a number of characters from sounding like types.
Catherine Raven
RaveThe Washington PostWhat emotional vocabulary can express both the joy and the doubts she experienced devoting copious time and love to a wild creature? This fanciful, literate, unsentimental and yet deeply felt memoir is her answer ... Every story demands a language of its own and Raven chooses a fluid, swift-moving style, which takes some getting used to ... She’s a superb nature writer, who also delves into cultural topics, such as the fox icons found in Inari temples in Japan ... More than most books, Raven’s sets out unique, even eccentric, terms, and she uses fictional techniques to round out her account, including sections told from Fox’s perspective. If a reader is willing, the experience of journeying alongside her as she lives with Fox and meditates about him is extremely rewarding ... Fox & I will appeal to those who despair about human depredation of the natural world and sense climate change as the looming, existential threat to life. But Raven’s book isn’t a treatise, it isn’t a call to arms, it isn’t political. Perhaps it is best understood as a plea for understanding.
Andrea Lee
RaveThe Washington PostLee’s superb fiction often describes the collisions between people who hail from different cultures. She returns to this fertile ground in a new novel but widens her scope, suggesting some historical wounds are too deep to heal, and even a woman who believes she has stepped beyond her own tribal identity can never free herself totally ... Lee isn’t writing magical realism per se — she is conjuring up a locale where the power of superstition still holds sway ... Lee’s prodigious talent for physical description causes her to overindulge at points, and a few passages of Red Island House sound like copy lifted from a high-end travel magazine...Also, because the story is told in stand-alone stories, Red Island House has less propulsive power than Lee’s stirring 2006 novel, Lost Hearts in Italy ... But these are niggling criticisms of a gorgeous narrative that perhaps only Lee could have constructed — an ambitious attempt to use fiction to explore the reality of a world fractured by race and class, and divided between the haves and the have-hardly-anything-at-alls.
Saskia Maarleveld
PositiveThe Washington Post... the action takes place in neutral Sweden and touches upon little-known aspects of Swedish history – including an obsession with racial purity, and discrimination against the non-Nordic, indigenous Sami population of the country’s northern reaches ... The story is told from multiple perspectives, and gradually zeros in on a conspiracy that explains all the events. The reader must endure a slow start as various plotlines are established, but the pace quickens at the halfway mark. Ekback excels at presenting red herrings, and the plot zigzags in intriguing ways. The novel also examines the pervasiveness of racial stereotyping and the shifting allegiances in wartime Sweden, where plenty of people sympathized with Adolf Hitler’s Germany ... Though the overly speculative nature of the story is a weakness, its construction and dramatic denouncement are quite satisfying, and this what-if story illuminates a little-explored corner of wartime Europe.
Paraic O'Donnell
PositiveThe Washington PostParaic O’Donnell starts off The House on Vesper Sands in winter 1893, re-creating a foggy metropolis of dark menace and eerie beauty, and populated by a properly Dickensian cast ... Readers may be inclined to struggle with keeping track of the tale’s various strands, and the occult aspect at the heart of the mystery won’t be to everyone’s taste, but O’Donnell’s rendering of the past is faithful not only to how people ate, spoke and dressed in 1893, but also to how they thought. The House at Vesper Sands summons up that spirit, beckoning it from a long dead world and into our own.
Meg Wolitzer
MixedTIME\"...[a] cheerful, sprawling and well-meaning novel ... In this era of call-outs and take-downs, Wolitzer reinforces a more old-fashioned concept: no one is perfect ... Sharp observations about status anxiety, social pretensions and upper-middle-class sexual mores are Wolitzer specialities. They offer welcome relief from the novel’s facile politics–eye-catching seashells on long stretches of deserted beach. The novel rambles too much and has too many main characters ... she’s less interested in scoring points than in presenting engaging characters. In that realm, the novel is sporadically successful. The moral of her story is that women owe it to each other, and to the world, to be their best selves. Now there’s a feminist message we can all find persuasive, if far from revolutionary.\
