RaveThe CutUncommonly elegant ... Unfolds as a coming-of-age story with whiffs of Toni Morrison, Jamaica Kincaid, and Elena Ferrante. The scope is ambitious ... Lives in the margins of desire and jealousy, intimacy and individuation, certainty and ambivalence. But it’s most interested in that tantalizing, agonizing ambiguity that young queer girls can share between friendship and romantic love ... Much of the novel’s power comes from its unanswered questions, which are allowed to remain unresolved in part because Ruth is a remote and unflappable narrator, giving the fine-tuned appearance of being direct without actually revealing much of what she wants. Ruth’s nonchalance often comes encased in a delightful deadpan ... A thrilling and capacious novel about intimacy and art-making in which the narrator proves to be more compelling than her muse.
Aria Aber
MixedVultureAn ambitious, often beautiful, yet bloated debut set against the backdrop of Germany’s growing anti-immigrant sentiment, wrestles with the knot of Nila’s self-loathing without ever quite undoing it ... Captures the ache of Muslim girlhood and the vertigo of never feeling quite at home ... Aber is skilled at creating a charged sense of atmosphere and mood, but the novel tends to rehash the same narrative associations without deepening or complicating them ... Nila’s self-deprecation makes an unsatisfying substitute for enlightenment, and without the dynamism that could spring from the push and pull between two versions of the self, the story feels a little too much like the photos she takes: static ... Best read as a portrait of Berlin and the rise of its anti-immigrant sentiment as seen through the eyes of a grieving young Afghan woman. Aber conjures place with great specificity; her descriptions feel alive. But Good Girl is also stuffed with tropes of a certain kind of millennial novel.
Rachel Cusk
PositiveColumbia JournalIn Coventry, Rachel Cusk’s first collection of nonfiction writing, she has not reinvented the essay as she innovated the novel in her Outline trilogy—what she has done instead is showcase the pleasurable continuity of a mind at work on the same questions over time ... in the nonfiction register she writes with stunning clarity about her own capacity for cruelty, but also for compassion, perseverance, and maternal love ... The essay collection is broken into three sections, but it’s in the first—Coventry—that Cusk’s digressive style glimmers most, sometimes leading the reader to unexpected places ... Cusk is a master of the illustrative anecdote, allowing her to telescope between the specific and the abstract ... All in all, Cusk’s rare intelligence shines in these essays. But I did find myself missing the subtle situational humor that her eye for irony brought to her fiction—those dazzling moments where, in the latticework of allegory and specificity, a bit of light squeezed brightly through the cracks.
