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Sonali Deraniyagala
Rave The Boston Globe ...a torrent of shame floods this bracing and ruthlessly self-confrontational memoir. But the shame is owned by the author herself, who shouldered the unfathomable burden of a grieving woman convinced that, in the final count, she failed the mother test ... Deraniyagala reinhabits this tempestuous period with graphic immediacy, exposing “the outlandish truth of me” in terse, impressionistic thought waves that make manifest the tenuous line separating grief from rage and cruelty.
Jay Hosking
Rave The New York Times Book Review Hosking’s tense opening pages up the ante in the crowded post-Gone Girl shelf of disappearing acts by piling on the mysterious departures of a volatile lab researcher named Grace, along with her lover and work colleague, John ... Coherence frequently goes missing as well in this unnamed character’s zigzagging account, which back-and-forths over three years as it chronicles the decline of his fractious relationship with his girlfriend in tandem with the mental and physical disintegrations of Grace and John. Hosking drops hints along the way that his narrator, a Scotch guzzler and three-time university flunk-out, isn’t playing with a full deck of cards ...his own descent into madness feels preordained, and we’re left to muddle through a hallucinatory denouement that smacks more of old-school acid trip than science or magic.
Philipp Meyer
Positive The Boston Globe Meyer’s tale is vast, volcanic, prodigious in violence, intermittently hard to fathom, not infrequently hard to stomach, and difficult to ignore … The novel’s larger-than-life embodiment of this uniquely Texan durability is Eli McCullough (a.k.a. The Colonel), the patriarchal fulcrum in a triad of characters who each provide a bridge into three of the state’s defining influences: the Mexicans, the Indians, and oil … If Meyer is consistently exacting in period voice and minutiae, his protagonists command our attention in varying degrees...Eli ultimately steals this big show.
Hanya Yanagihara
Positive The Boston Globe \"Yanagihara revels as well in the atmosphere and minutiae of her characters’ respective industries: The early pages of A Little Life zing with the heady energies of architecture firms off Madison Square, communal art studios in Long Island City, and Chelsea eateries where pretty actor/waiters sportingly deflect come-ons from gay male patrons. Few novels have so stirringly captured the unfettered angst and exhilaration of gaining a toehold in New York City ... Yanagihara puts us to the empathy test. Jude’s physical and psychic injuries are so exhaustingly inventoried that I found my compassion giving way to impatience with his hamster-wheel marathon of self-flagellation and mulish refusal to seek help ... Alternately devastating and draining, A Little Life floats all sorts of troubling questions about the responsibility of the individual to those nearest and dearest and the sometime futility of playing brother’s keeper. Those questions, accompanied by Yanagihara’s exquisitely imagined characters, will shadow your dreamscapes.\
Richard Russo
Positive The Boston Globe The spectre of mortality is very much at the core of Everybody’s Fool. As the hard-living Sully digests a grim heart diagnosis, Raymer wrestles with the discovery that his wife Becka, in the months prior to her tumbling down the stairs to her death, was carrying on with another man ... Some complain that Russo errs on the side of overplotting, and personally I wouldn’t have minded if a late-blooming back story involving the mayor and his wife went missing along with that garage-door opener. For Russo’s acolytes, however, too much of a muchness is part of the lure. You hold his books to your heart even when, like North Bath’s more over-indulgent citizens, they are a bit beefier than they really ought to be.
Piers Paul Read
Pan The New York Times Book Review In Scarpia, Read sets out to vindicate the unscrupulous police chief from “Tosca,” who may have been based on a real-life Bourbon baron ... The book opens with fablelike charm as it tracks the mercurial fortunes of its hero, tumbling in dishonor from the Spanish Royal Guards and then ascending among the Roman elite, as well as the rising star of Tosca, a gardener’s daughter turned operatic darling. But well before they meet cute in a Venetian gondola, the narrative bogs down in a recitation of power plays between the embattled republican and loyalist factions. A ­cymbal-crash of a climax is waiting in the wings, but the effect is that of a clanging school bell at the end of a drifting lecture.
Jon Wray
Positive The Boston Globe At times, the author’s belabored attempts at replicating the brain-freezing stylizations and vocabulary of kitschy science fiction become a drag on his otherwise fleet plotting. But his empathy for people with a finger’s grip on sanity galvanizes his tale with a liberating touch of crazy.
Oscar Hijuelos
Positive The Boston Globe At day’s end, Twain and Stanley Enter Paradise delivers as an erudite vaudeville of turn-of-the-century superstars (Bram Stoker! Gladstone! Conan Doyle!) and a self-effacing swan song for a gifted novelist who, in modulating his singular voice to harmonize with those of his fabled subjects, seems to be meditating upon his own place in the pantheon.
Anthony Marra
Rave The Boston Globe Where his first effort felt virtuosic but somewhat airless, Marra here emerges with an oxygenizing wisdom and an arsenal of wit as inexhaustible as it is unlikely, given such forlorn terrain.