MixedThe Minneapolis Star-TribuneWith Kimmy\'s kidnapping at its center, Kids Run the Show has the shape of a thriller, but it\'s more sociological than mysterious and more interesting than involving ... The novel puts us into the viewer\'s position, participating vicariously in the story de Vigan tells, but never really, never quite, feeling it.
Jayne Anne Phillips
PositiveThe Minneapolis Star-TribuneJayne Anne Phillips is very good at writing awful things ... Jayne Anne Phillips is very good at writing awful things. Which might be why what\'s most powerful in her Night Watch is a rape. Another thing Phillips is very good at is capturing a sort of inner dialect, conveyed here in a language inflected with a Southern twang, modulated to reflect characters\' social status and degree of education ... But it is when Phillips channels the thoughts of the others that the telling, like the story itself, becomes as compelling, even beautiful, as it is difficult to experience.
Kelly Barnhill
PositiveThe Star-TribuneIf you can get past — or better yet, go along with — the crane, this brief book is absorbing, thought-provoking, and, in spite of or perhaps because of its outlandish premise, irresistibly readable.
Jane Smiley
RaveThe Star TribuneLet\'s just say this book is exceedingly charming and get that out of the way ...This is one of those books that is hard to categorize, though it hardly matters. Written with the simplicity and wonder common to children\'s literature, Perestroika in Paris is smart and interesting enough to engage grown-ups — who might find, in this unlikely alliance of animals, a hint of the comfort of companionship among strangers so sorely lacking in our contentious moment.
Ann Patchett
PositiveThe Star TribuneAnn Patchett made this up! Well, duh, you might say — it’s a novel, she’s a fiction writer. And yet what’s striking is how little like fiction it feels, with Danny Conroy telling us about his life as if someone asked: What’s the deal with the Dutch House? ... For all its memoiristic feel — the meetings and marriages, curious incidents, explanations and missed chances, as Danny goes to medical school but then to work, like his father, in real estate, always under the watchful eye of his beloved motherly Maeve — the story has the makings of a fairy tale: the exiled children, the enchanted house, a touch of Cinderella, a hint of Hansel and Gretel. And squaring off at the heart of either, life story or fairy tale, are the lessons of absence and loss: how to love what’s gone, and what remains.
