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Recent Reviews
Claire Dederer
Pan The Brooklyn Rail \"One hates to take Dederer’s word for it, but too often heightened emotion substitutes for substance in Monsters ... perhaps Dederer will return to the realm of memoir, where her forthrightness and humor are better employed in describing her own artistic and political battle. Appropriating the lives of others, she has proven, is for her a dead end.\
Lauren Groff
Mixed The Women\'s Review of Books Groff is a writer whose prose can do anything and occasionally does too much ... She can play the organ all stops pulled out and cause you to reverberate from within; she can pluck a few strings on the lute and make you sadder than you thought possible. While the counterpoint of crashing chords and sweet notes makes her prose seem unplaceable within the pantheon of contemporary fiction, Groff stands solidly within the American Gothic ... lightly researched ... As with Marie’s religious visions, these episodes of pleasure are interludes, not ultimately attached to the novel’s concerns ... There is a strange hurry to this novel of a slow time, the paragraphs that trip through decades, the lack of focus on Marie’s inner life as a monastic and writer, the sense of characters merely as foils to Marie’s plotting. The use of indirect discourse throughout the novel means that we have very little sense of individual voices. This solves the problem of vernacular speech in historical fiction, but it does muffle the characters. For a writer of Groff’s rare inventive powers, it is disappointing, too, that certain scenes seem pro forma, for example when Marie arrives at the abbey and dismounts her horse to land face-first into a pile of shit. Perhaps we need the tragedy before the farce, or perhaps we’ve seen this scene too recently on Netflix, but it strikes a tired note ... ends not with a bang but a whimper, as much of her fiction does despite its linguistic daring and outsize themes.
Sally Rooney
Mixed The Women\'s Review of Books As these questions emerge between characters—through their conflicts, actions and speech—they animate the narrative. As they are explored in Eileen and Alice’s sometimes tendentious emails, their primary mode of communication, the ideas can seem undercooked, the vegetables of the meal shoved to the side and easily ignored ... Rooney’s decision, though, to keep the reader out of the heads (although not the bedrooms) of the characters, especially of the two women protagonists, notably a writer and an editor, can leave the reader impatient with being fenced out. Why can’t we be made to better understand Alice’s shakiness, her rage? ... The song also, at the very last, unleashes the conflict between these characters and nudges them out of the doldrums into action. After this, the writing takes on a new power, moving us to a place where the past and a larger world collide. One wishes, then, not for Rooney’s wittier early novels, but for this writer to sidestep too small a beautiful world and to let loose her voice—and her characters’ voices too.
Celia Paul
Positive The Women\'s Review of Books ... is a delicate reconstruction of a self never lost but perhaps silenced ... As a woman, as one of Freud’s many lovers, as a painter bent on capturing the unseen beyond the material world, Celia Paul has a large task in stepping beyond a male-dominated and fame-obsessed art world. The opening of her book, which describes her first encounter with Freud, makes clear how capable she is of taking control, both then and now ... Celia Paul read Dickens as a young woman and lived near the Brontë parsonage with her family. There is something of both writers in her tale, the quiet, much plagued child who eventually, through inherent worth and hard work, triumphs in London. She has written her own story, though, and rescued a remarkable painter.