RaveCleveland Review of BooksMooallem\'s second book...is an invigorating retelling of three days in March 1964 ... Mooallem writes about a special person here, a truly empathetic character who has the chance, then and now, to tell us more about ourselves. With finely wrought detail, thanks to Chance’s journal entries and broadcast recordings, we can experience the disaster through the same jarring, slowed-down lens that colored her life ... Not only is Mooallem an apt writer with this sort of gripping journalistic material...but moreover he has an eye for the gaps in our shared reality, for the gaps that emerge between daily life and history ... With deft touches to everything from chapter pacing and paragraph structure, he draws that fuzzy dislocation into the room with us as we read.
Anabel Hernandez, Trans. by John Washington
RaveThe Cleveland Review of BooksHernández, with her searing analysis of an ongoing brutality, adds another notch to a history of Mexican journalism and public indictment against the government ... Her evidence is compelling. A Massacre in Mexico is a limber display of investigative journalism. The reader, no doubt, leaves this book informed of how things work in the halls of outgoing President Enrique Peña Nieto\'s Mexico. Along the way, this riveting nexus of truth and lie is a sickening reading process ... The book reads like a long, immersive magazine feature, one that takes a surgical blade to a labyrinthine corruption scandal ... Structurally, Hernández circles her subjects like a hawk, or, rather, like a savvy producer; what I mean to say is that this book flows elegantly for the narrative-obsessed reader otherwise unfamiliar with the political leitmotifs of Mexican civil society. It\'s not an easy read, but its simplicity in prose is an achievement. It reads like a season of Serial on the page, one might say.
