MixedThe New York Times Book ReviewThe seamless overlap between real life and fictional counterparts, and the faithful reproduction of such well-established facts, conveys the author’s intention to offer a crystal clear clé to this roman à clef ... If Gonzalez’s intention is to compare the experiences of these two women against their common backdrop, her decision to set her protagonists only 13 years apart is curious. Who questions how little progress was made when so little time has passed? Spacing Anita’s and Raquel’s lives further apart would have allowed the author to emphasize what has changed in the art world, alongside what has not ... After Anita’s death, the novel takes a sharp detour into magical realism, following the artist into a liminal, post-death existence that incorporates her posthumous commentary ... It asks a good deal of a reader to shape-shift with Anita, and while many may gladly make that jump with the author, I found I wasn’t one of them. In the end, it was simply a leap (or, more likely, a push) too far.
Keziah Weir
PositiveThe New York Times Book Review\"I am happy to report that Keziah Weir’s assured first novel, The Mythmakers, is a laudable addition to a reading list that already includes such standouts as Meg Wolitzer’s The Wife, Karen Dukess’s The Last Book Party, Andrew Lipstein’s Last Resort and R.F. Kuang’s new novel, Yellowface ... Like many a writer writing about writers, Weir seems to take great pleasure in laying literary mines throughout her work...and it’s only right that Meg Wolitzer’s The Wife should also rear its head in this story of multiple combative, creative marriages. Weir weaves an even more appropriate conversation between The Mythmakers and Wolitzer’s debut novel, Sleepwalking, in which a young woman insinuates herself into the family of a dead writer for reasons not yet clear to herself. Like Wolitzer’s, Weir’s protagonist will learn the lesson of all narcissistic endeavors: that the bad behavior, mishegoss and pain of another person’s life have, in the end, absolutely nothing to do with us.\
Jenny Jackson
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewNot only does she succeed in getting us not to loathe the Stocktons, the family at the center of her debut novel, Pineapple Street, but she even succeeds in persuading us to love them. A little bit ... An unabashedly old-fashioned story involving wills, trust funds, prenups and property ... While Jackson’s characters are admirably complex and not un-self-aware, and while they do ruminate on privilege and what it provides...the concept of entitlement never quite leaves the novel’s background ... Take these things as they are or don’t take them at all; the novel and its author offer no apologies.
Julia May Jonas
RaveThe New York Times Book Review... a witty dance with the ghost of Nabokov and a razor-edged commentary on academia at our current fraught moment ... At the end of the day, these characters may suffer skewering as English professors, and they may suffer skewering as all-too-human lovers, but Jonas seems to take the most pleasure in tormenting them as writers ... contains far too many uncomfortable truths to be merely fun, but — especially for those of us with feet in the worlds of academia and literature — it remains, by turns, cathartic, devious and terrifically entertaining.
Joshua Henkin
RaveThe New York Times Book Review... radiates a tenderness for the city that we, his intended readers, can best appreciate — perhaps now most of all, as we ask our city to return to us ... Henkin is a fine writer with a wry fondness for his characters, but like any New Yorker he knows how to keep a safe distance. The specific letting-go that all New Yorkers must master if we don’t wish to be crippled by nostalgia — especially now, if we do hope to see our city’s resurgence — is particularly nuanced when a city neighborhood is also a college town, but Henkin more than meets this challenge.
Paula Hawkins
PanThe New York Times Sunday Book ReviewRachel might as well be wearing a sign that reads ‘Unreliable Narrator’ … It’s difficult to imagine any way these events could be rendered credible, but The Girl on the Train is further impaired by its narrative structure … The fact that Rachel’s first-person voice is so maddening — alternately imprecise and overtly declarative — doesn’t mitigate the reader’s frustration … Readers sometimes conflate the ‘likability’ of characters with a compulsion to care about their fate, but with a protagonist so determined to behave illogically, self-destructively and frankly narcissistically (someone even refers to her as ‘Nancy Drew’), it’s tough to root for Rachel.
Amy Gentry
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewGentry seems less interested in answering the question of whether this Julie Whitaker is the stolen child of the same name than she is in taking a longer, harder look at what makes up an identity in the first place ... If the central question of the novel is inescapably simple — Is this person Julie Whitaker or isn’t she? — there are only two possible answers. But the attendant riddle of identity is correspondingly complex. In the end, Gentry’s novel isn’t primarily about the version of the self that comes from a name and a family of origin; instead, it draws our attention to the self that’s forged from sheer survival, and from the clarifying call to vengeance.
