PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewIt would be very easy to blame the school\'s not-so-subtle caste system for Lee\'s problems and unhappiness, but Sittenfeld doesn\'t. Lee is no saint, and no victim, but rather a willing cog in the machine of exclusion ... It is the sex between Lee and her crush, Cross, a boy far more popular than she is, that lifts the book, overlong at more than 400 pages, out of its sophomore slump, and restores its narrative momentum. Sittenfeld captures the teenage hook-up experience in a way that isn\'t too cringingly young-adult or clinically distant ... In the end, however, Lee\'s passivity, her refusal to pursue anything past the point where it might get embarrassing, limits her as a character. This isn\'t to say the story doesn\'t feel true to life. Sittenfeld\'s dialogue is so convincing that one wonders if she didn\'t wear a wire under her hockey kilt ... What is of interest, and why Prep deserves pride of place on any summer recommended reading list, is the incisive and evenhanded way in which Sittenfeld explores issues of class ... Sittenfeld\'s novel sets up dramatic expectations that aren\'t met. By the end of the book—which culminates in graduation, naturally—we see that life at Ault hasn\'t changed Lee in any profound way.
Rachel Cusk
PositiveThe New York Times...writing a memoir of motherhood seems like career suicide. Although no one told Cusk that, and so she\'s gone off and written a book that is funny and smart and refreshingly akin to a war diary -- sort of Apocalypse Baby Now, with descriptions of \'the anarchy of nights, the fog of days . . . friendlessness and exile from the past\' that will trigger in some mothers soul-scorching flashbacks ... Yet her reluctance to use her admirable skills as a fiction writer is the book\'s one misstep ... Where her fiction can seem to fall into obvious genres -- a woman\'s search for love, a mad country caper -- A Life\'s Work is wholly original and unabashedly true.
John Boyne
MixedThe New York Times Book Review\"Unfortunately, neither Maurice nor the novel, which until this point is very engaging, thrives in captivity ... [A Ladder to the Sky employs] a narrative device that is a bit baffling for the reader... until a twist sends the plot, regrettably, in a different direction, away from its promising beginning as a comic novel satirizing the literary world, and toward the realm of simple satire, which glories in cliché and antic cruelty. I wish Boyne had chosen one path or the other. I cheer his attacks on the publishing industrial complex, but the strokes are so broad the assault is more ticklish than brutal. If satire was Boyne’s intention, a bit more poison in the pen would have helped in drawing out the three female characters, all of whom suffer under the weight of stereotypes.\
Jhumpa Lahiri
RaveVanity FairJhumpa Lahiri is an elegant stylist, effortlessly placing the perfect words in the perfect order time and again so we’re transported seamlessly into another place … In her new novel, The Lowland, it’s the 1960s, and violent revolution has come to Calcutta and America, with reverberations to be felt by generations to come. Every family story is somehow a war story; Lahiri has a talent for coolly illustrating this truth … What happens to Udayan in the lowland is the spark that ignites the novel. Subhash’s forced return and the discovery that the woman his brother has defiantly married is also pregnant will launch him into the battle of his life.
Ottessa Moshfegh
PositiveThe Los Angeles TimesThat sound you hear? Packs of barking dogs, screaming sirens echoing through the hallowed halls of the literary patriarchy? That’s Ottessa Moshfegh and her debut collection of stories, Homesick for Another World setting off the alarm ... Moshfegh has a taste for targeting the culture’s misogyny and male privilege. Sentence to sentence she gleefully manipulates the fates of her despicable cast of entitled, sexually repressed egomaniacs ... Moshfegh writes writes with Bukowksi-like gusto and a loving matter-of-factness about their — or rather she would say our — most base bodily functions. The ways our bodies terrorize us and the satisfaction that can be gained in seizing control ... Amid all this physical deformity, the most successful stories are those about characters that are ugly on the inside. Moshfegh’s flair for evisceration is best displayed when the character isn’t wearing a colostomy bag but a Hermes ... Tempted though you might be, it’s a disservice to the book as a whole to read the stories one after the other. If you could. The sameness of the characters and locations can cause stories to blur together. Moshfegh’s insistence on focusing on the uneasy, outwardly hostile relationship the characters have with their bodies can at times feel puerile and, other times, it obscures the larger story.
