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.
