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Recent Reviews
Anne Boyd Rioux
Positive The Christian Science Monitor Rioux makes an excellent case for...re-reading, providing a cultural-historical tour of the classic book and its many reiterations in popular culture ... As Rioux points out, the bold adventures of Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy all end in either happy, domesticated marriages or—in Beth’s case— in death. Those options are less than exciting for our feminists sisters of the 1970s. But things get exciting when one considers that these contradictions can be enlightening, and may even be the point. \'Multidimensionality\' is a word Rioux uses often, and it’s a good one to describe the Little Women of the book, their choices, the pressures to conform and the pain of noncomformity, and the paths they take toward womanhood. In this way, Alcott—a writer who churned out, and enjoyed, sensational stories that dealt in melodrama and power struggles between the sexes—was after all a realist. Rioux could even more deeply explore and re-envision the place of the multifaceted Alcott and Jo March in the literary lineage connecting them with Henry James and his Daisy Miller, Charlotte Bronte and Jane Eyre, and with Jane Austen and the likes of Eliza Bennett ... So the strength of Alcott and her little women is also borne of a massively strong intelligence, grindingly hard work, and character, even when it’s confined to domesticity. It’s why their story still matters.
Jessica Bruder
Positive The Christian Science Monitor In Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century, writer Jessica Bruder is pursuing a moving target: the new class of Americans who have traded in real estate for 'wheel estate,' having lost their mortgages, their savings, and their dreams in the Great Recession or individual disasters, to become 'workampers' ... Bruder tackles her task with heaps of reportorial detail and narrative flair ... But while her prices and statistics punctuate the narrative, Bruder also manages to tap into the spiritual, the metaphorical, and the hopeful ... Is this American resilience, or American denial? Bruder doesn’t shrink from the question ... Bruder’s answer is to outfit a van named Halen and go on the road. The result is this up-close look at the workampers, their world, and what this moment says about America ...a refreshingly optimistic one, even amidst the bleak analysis. Bruder not only writes what she sees, but she eloquently makes some sense of it.
Jill Bialosky
Mixed The Christian Science Monitor In Poetry Will Save Your Life, the poet Jill Bialosky endeavors to bottle up the emotional response we readers have to poetry ...is a sketchbook of personal experience through the lens of poetry, as Bialosky illuminates for us the joys and tragedies that have shaped her – saved her – and the poems that have guided her along the way ...book perhaps suffers a bit from the absence of a compelling through-line – the stories and poems are presented in small sketches along many themes, without the momentum or narrative arc that readers have grown to expect in memoirs ... With these gracious intensely personal sketches, her narratives told through the prism of verse, Bialosky convinces us that poetry is alive and ready to breathe with us.
Wayne Flynt
Positive The Christian Science Monitor Flynt’s small collection of letters here provides a glimpse of Nelle Harper Lee in her last years, and a taste of the candor, affection, and humor she revealed to those she loved and trusted. Perhaps the quality of Nelle Harper Lee that hits readers of this collection immediately and full force is her humor. The woman was funny ... Flynt’s own understanding and admiration for the novel and the themes it evokes is both spiritual and scholarly ... This collection would benefit from having more of Flynt’s own analysis – its mixture of spirit and scholarship – informing the letters, which are instead introduced largely with anecdotes about the two families, the Flynts and the Lees.
Lillian Ross
Rave The Christian Science Monitor But while Ross is dedicated to reporting – to teasing out the truth of a character, a setting, or situation – also on full display here are the stunning, if quieter, literary and storytelling techniques that inform her work.