RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewIn Wendy Guerra’s writing, Cuba is a character, a cosmic force, the loneliest place, the only place. Her third novel, I Was Never the First Lady, stitches together threads of island and identity until they become one and the same ... If these signs suggest autofiction, Guerra’s collagelike style firmly bucks any genre. She integrates poems, song lyrics, radio scripts, letters, narrative within narrative, diary entries and notes, all coming together to form a whole ... haunting and complicated, linguistically beautiful yet labyrinthine. It builds a world of living ghosts and opens a chasm of aching as much for the things that are present as for those that have disappeared.
Rumaan Alam
RaveLos Angeles Review of BooksThe characters in Rumaan Alam’s ominous new novel, Leave the World Behind, directly grapple with a series of important existential questions: 1. How do you behave in an emergency? 2. What kind of prejudices do you, liberal you, hold quietly in your heart? And 3. What do you do when you’re afraid? ... Alam seems intent on exploding racism and its complexities via the analysis of very specific relationships and dynamics ... Alam’s novel feels far more concerned with questions of character, prejudice, and morality than it does with plot. His book seems to be built on a thesis of exploring what disaster does to a person, and at times, the characters feel like vehicles for that thesis rather than characters in their own right ... There is a pervasive sense that the characters are trapped in a tableau, which in part could be a commentary on their luxurious backdrop, the sly way this cocooned vacation home starts to feel suffocatingly isolated. Early in the novel a passivity settles over the group, and while that too could be because they are in a comfortable space, it is never satisfactorily examined ... Leave the World Behind is an interesting type of apocalypse examination because it focuses on what happens to those removed from the action. Rather than fully examining the ramifications of this strange new world, it looks at the scars from the old world — race, class — that must be confronted in order for these characters to survive in the new.
Ilana Masad
MixedLos Angeles Review of BooksThe novel’s setup and accompanying journey are both absorbing, but they yield somewhat superficial discoveries about Iris. We meet the lovers of the title, but don’t ever understand many of the choices Iris makes while in their company. The book never quite reconciles the Iris we understand within the familial unit of the Krause home with the woman Maggie learns about in talking to these men. Iris remains as much a mystery to the reader as she does to Maggie. Indeed, the entire family is secretive ... One gets the urge to have this family sit down together and spill their guts. The novel also straddles a puzzling line between the socially progressive and the literary cliché ... Maggie is...an exciting, fresh, contemporary character, who still unfortunately falls into clichés of plot. With a character so woke, it feels oddly surprising when the plot falls into formulaic pits, most notably exemplified in a trip to an omniscient psychic who could easily exist on the Disney Channel. There is also the unfortunate nature of the novel’s big reveal, which feels far too easy and clean an answer for the complexity of the pages and the characters that come before ... There are many things for which All My Mother’s Lovers should be praised, not least of which is its cast of dynamic, complicated queer characters whose relationship problems have nothing to do with how they identify ... All My Mother’s Lovers is engaging, and confident, and often wry, but it unfortunately does not satisfyingly resolve the mysteries we readers want solved. Perhaps, though, that lack of answers is a resolution in and of itself.
Jeanette Winterson
RaveLos Angeles Review of BooksIn the Mary Shelley narrative, Winterson anachronistically and successfully brings us through the joys and gut-punch pains of Shelley’s life. She is painted as a woman very much in love, but one who has been entangled with death from the first moment of her life when her mother died in childbirth ... Winterson is the mad scientist here, her book the monster...her book becoming both the stitched-together body of multiple literary works and an all-encompassing consciousness of literary culture ... With a book so built upon ideas, there are times when the density weighs it down ... There are moments when the highly conceptual nature of Winterson’s work elevates to such a level that it became hard for this reader to breathe. But Winterson has the ability to quickly return to the immediacy and vibrancy and tangibility of the scenes at hand ... Winterson’s work is at once artfully structured, unexpectedly funny, and impressively dynamic.
