RaveThe Herald (UK)... in 110 deceptively effortless pages, she takes the national scandal of the Magdalene laundries and tells it so quietly you scarcely want to breathe. It is the quietness of the telling that makes the cruelty so stark; the ordinariness of the community she portrays that makes its complicity so hard to bear ... Keegan is the goddess of small things. Her ability to conjure whole worlds from a few words; an entire relationship from a handful of exchanges, is little short of miraculous. The chapter in which the Furlongs prepare for Christmas is a pure joy ... The genius is in the precision of the writing; in the details, and how Keegan makes each one count ... what the reader is left with is less a searing indictment of a national outrage than an affirmation of human decency. Small Things Like These assures us we are all capable of doing the right thing, and that goodness, like misery, can be handed on from man to man. It is a literary state of grace.
Rebecca Solnit
PositiveThe Big Issue (UK)... the book proves an entertaining ramble through the author’s life and Solnit’s consciousness ... For the most part, this rhizomatic exercise yields great blooms ... Much of the pleasure of Solnit’s book lies in its randomness. Is Orwell’s Roses as perfectly cultivated as Orwell’s roses? Probably not, but it’s fun to stroll through the wilderness.
Dantiel W. Moniz
RaveThe Big Issue... outstanding ... thrums with a sticky sensuality. The situations Moniz’s characters encounter are familiar – sibling rivalry, infidelity, rebellion – but her perspective is so unusual, and her descriptions so visceral, her stories are a dark but thrilling joyride off the beaten track ... At times, Moniz’s writing has an almost hallucinogenic quality; it reads like a mad reverie brought on by the humidity of her native Florida, where much of it is set ... And yet Milk Blood Heat is full of light. Moniz’s gift for the macabre is complemented by an ability to capture the joy in everyday moments ... a celebration: of fraught but fierce relationships, and life in all its fractured glory.
