PositiveBookforum... by turns a woman’s travelogue of the Great Plains, a sweeping history of the American West, and a cross-sectional study of contemporary Christian theology ... Mockett...spent childhood summers with her father’s family in Nebraska for the harvest. Her mother’s family is Japanese; a cousin runs a Zen Buddhist temple in Iwaki. Her insight into both cultures (and, perhaps, the Du Boisian “second sight” of the outsider) enlivens her questions about identity, community, and religion, and adds depth to her approach ... Mockett’s memoir mostly takes the city vs. country narrative as a given, but also reveals the unnoticed qualities the two places share ... Mockett is a genuinely curious, meticulous narrator, open to experience and confident enough to acknowledge her own biases ... Mockett doesn’t resolve the conflicting ideas and discomfiting contradictions she observes on her travels. Chief among them is the contrast between the beauty of the landscape and the ugliness of its history.
Kiley Reid
PositiveBookforum...darkly funny and often sincere ... The book feels purposefully of-the-moment, with references to fast fashion, trap music, and Lean In–style feminism. Reid also has a knack for the rhythm of dialogue. She delights in modern linguistic tics like vocal fry, upspeak, and the singsong cadence of rappers that has seeped into everyday speech ... Reid overlays a serious analysis of the ways in which race, class, and gender interact ... Reid’s novel captures something important about race and the inexorability of whiteness, upward mobility, and the inescapability of digital life.
Sarah M. Broom
RaveBookforumBroom’s writing—intricate and prismatic as a honeycomb—is by turns tender, exacting, sweeping, and biblical ... The Yellow House is divided into four sections Broom calls \'movements.\' The first, The World Before Me, is elegiac and dense with the histories of the people and places who compose Broom’s origins and is at times weighed down by its detail. But Broom’s next section vaults forward in time and plumbs different themes ... The story told in The Yellow House is as embedded in the way it is told as it is in its plot and characters ... The Yellow House’s complexity—its refusal to summarize, its reliance on exacting, painterly detail, patient contextualization, and infusions of tenderness and humor—is an insistence on a capacious black humanity ... Broom arranges her family’s stories of flight and survival into a collage of oral histories that resound like a chorus ... a masterwork of art and journalism, is about the grave mistakes of the twentieth century, washed ashore in the twenty-first. We may not survive the forthcoming floods. Broom’s memoir records how we might rebuild if we do.
