PositiveO, Oprah MagazineAt the tender heart of the book are families—natal and improvised, lost and recuperated—and the rituals that bind them ... Washington layers these intimacies scene by scene, memory by memory.
Zadie Smith
RaveOprah Magazine...yet another kaleidoscopic display of her singular sophistication ... Smith’s compositions—rife with ambivalence, in love with ideas, witty and mordant—echo in the head long after the last word ... As a whole, Grand Union stands as a glittering affirmation of Smith’s virtuosity and range. And because she is such a generous and penetrating observer of the world, one keeps turning the pages and exclaiming with recognition.
Colson Whitehead
RaveThe Oprah Magazine... a thrilling and tragic climax. Since its moral concern is multigenerational anguish, the sense of mourning in The Nickel Boys is subvisceral—not detached, but restrained ... The invocation is Faulknerian, the novel’s pained eye landing where we’d least like it: on ourselves. We are called to remember, \'The past is never dead. It’s not even past.\'
Boris Fishman
PositiveO, The Oprah MagazineIf [this] sounds like a slightly forced premise, have no fear: With Fishman, we are in the hands of a genuine miniaturist, a cultivator of particulars, a writer who knows that familial conflict is the realm of intense feeling packaged in tiny gestures.
