PositiveThe Washington Post\"In the end, The Critic’s Daughter is about the complex love between a parent and a child. It’s not just a book for literary gossips ... Most childhood memoirs depict the author as an adult in child’s clothing ... This one is sometimes childlike, still earnest and effusive. The memoir genre also pumps out innumerable rote tales of becoming, of breaking free, of learning to \'direct\' one’s own life. It offers few stories of being and remaining entangled ... The Critic’s Daughter is an account of a love that’s neither takeoff strip nor landing pad, a child’s confounding adoration for her parent that’s neither really resolved nor extinguished.
Brendan Borrell
MixedThe New York TimesThe title is misleading. Borrell doesn’t only offer an inside look at the warp-speed vaccine-development process and rollout but also the government’s struggles over mask policy and the release of statistics while its own quarterback, ex-President Donald Trump, was running interference on his team ... Borrell had great access inside the Trump administration, and there are juicy details here. But his effort to make the pandemic-response story read like a cross between a Marvel movie and a police procedural falls flat ... Long ago, The First Shots was optioned by HBO, and it’s not clear if readers were the intended audience or TV producers.
Porochista Khakpour
RaveSlate\"The amazing thing about Khakpour’s book is the way she recognizes that any illness in modern life inevitably enters the mind. I hope Khakpour’s memoir isn’t relegated to the health section of the bookstore or of Amazon, because it’s not really about Lyme, or not most deeply about Lyme—it’s about modern life. And it’s one of the most chilling, if meandering, portraits of it I’ve read ... like reading the diary of someone you always wanted to be like, only to be transfixed by just how bad being that person can be ... Her tale reveals with unsettling clarity that the damage wrought by each of the disappointments is as cumulatively poisoning as any tick bite she might have gotten. And she unmasks the terrifying revelation that any person’s efforts to heal herself, bodily or psychically, have just as good a chance to be wounding as they do to be nourishing ... Khakpour’s prose is beautiful, at once silky and scorching, like the curls of smoke rising from a fire that’s just starting ... She’s profound, even prophetic, in the in-between passages where she’s muddling along, not quite broken but not quite whole, either ... Khakpour has written an unsettling book. But it’s one of lasting merit. It’s something to keep by our desks rather than our bedside tables: not a consolation but a provocation.\
