RaveThe New York Times Book Review... winning and amiable ... The end of the story does seem a bit rushed, and one might wish that the townspeople weren’t so relentlessly good and that the villains weren’t so cartoonishly villainous, but then one might feel waspish and small-hearted. The full and simple pleasures of Frankel’s luscious prose lull the reader into rooting for the good people of Bourne and these plucky heroines. After all, doesn’t rooting for uncomplicated integrity feel good these days?
Sigrid Nunez
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewReading Sigrid Nunez’s absorbing new novel is somewhat akin to having a long conversation with someone who is telling you something very important, but is telling it in a very quiet voice. You have to really pay attention. Be assured, however, that the experience will be worth it. You will emerge calmer, meditative, more thoughtful, as if you have benefited from an excellent literary massage of sorts ... Nunez tells the simplest of stories — about a woman accompanying a terminally ill friend through her last months — and expands it into an exploration of the largest of themes: nothing less than the realities of living and dying in this world and how we feel about both ... Like the best of our writers, Nunez is a bit of a seer and a prophet, and so it is discomfiting to imagine that what she presents here as the state of the world could be true ... Nunez’s unerring and quietly observant eye burrows further and further into these experiences as if they will unearth an answer of sorts ... Beauty, friendship, nature, art: These are the salves to loneliness and despair, and Nunez offers them all in this searching look into life and death.
