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Recent Reviews
Rafael Frumkin
Positive The New York Times Book Review Ezra is a clever narrator, brought to life by Frumkin in a knowing and well-paced first-person that gives Confidence the propulsive thrum of a tell-all.
Carolyn Hays
Positive The New York Times Book Review Availing itself of this form, Hays’s book is at once powerfully intimate and frustratingly pamphlet-like, particularly when the narration becomes impersonal and omniscient, peppered with random references to nonconformity, gender and otherwise, from throughout history ... The book is more moving when Hays trains her powers of observation on the sheer wonder of a child in bloom.
Jessi Hempel
Mixed The New York Times Book Review ... a full-hearted if overdetermined attempt to filter the stories of five individuals through the ready-made sieve of memoir and its subgenre, the coming-out story ... The book is so sweeping in scope that one could easily imagine a memoir by each of its main characters...But The Family Outing doesn’t quite feel like an ensemble narrative; here, the threads of family history are braided into one by Hempel alone, whose tenure as an accomplished technology and social media journalist lends the book a certain reportorial sensibility ... follows many of the dictates of coming-out narratives: Repression is followed by redemption, confession by understanding. But this family’s journey, as is often the case, is more compelling and diffuse than such a framework allows for.
Zak Salih
Pan The Nation At the book’s core is an immense and encumbering question of what it means to be a gay man today, now that the identifier is neither a death sentence nor a stamp of substantive rebellion. But...the question becomes its own kind of constraint ... [The book] possess[es] emotional and historical heft only by association with tragedies not experienced by its central characters, namely the AIDs epidemic and...the Pulse shooting. On such terms, these events begin to feel like contrivances of plot; they must ennoble, provide perspective, as though queer history mattered only insofar as it embroiders the present, tells us how to be and who to vote for. It is harder, though, and perhaps premature, to address history that is fresher, less easily narrativized, such as the series of breakthroughs and regressions...that characterize our present moment. Salih’s book tries to do so by reading at times less like a novel than like a dialectic between Sebastian and Oscar, between the assimilationists and the liberationists. If there is a middle ground on this continuum, it is suggested almost exclusively by the novel’s supporting characters, two of whom exist as symbols, who help expose the tyranny of both narrators’ convictions.