RaveOpen Letters ReviewMiller writes in a methodical, steely, gripping way about her trial. I knew every major turn of the case beforehand, and still found myself shaking a little, heart quickening as cross-questioning was endured, verdicts given, a sentence passed. But it’s everything in the surrounding chapters—her family and boyfriend, her childhood memories and bruising internal monologue, her stalled dreams and gradual reawakening—that adds depth to the trial. After being gifted such intimate knowledge of a person, it’s unnerving to see the ways she both does and doesn’t recognize herself in that courtroom ... another surprising source of eloquence is Miller’s writing, which often has the vivid, off-kilter feeling of poetry ... All the small conversations and reflections in Know My Name combine to offer a full picture of a struggling human, someone struggling with her new understanding of what it can mean to be human ... Chanel Miller’s battles, her joy, her voice, are hers, not stand-ins for anyone else’s. That’s precisely why so many readers will identify with her.
Téa Obreht
PositiveOpen Letters Review\"Inland features far more reflection than action, but Obreht maintains emotional momentum with these looming uncertainties. She relishes moments when the otherwise confident, decisive Nora plants her foot on a stair in the darkness, only to find the stair has disappeared from under her ... Nora is Obreht’s most fully-fleshed creation to date. Her widely praised debut, The Tiger’s Wife, was more notable for its trancelike vividness, and its magnetic weaving of history and folklore, than for any depth of individual characters. With Inland, she’s drawn on an entirely different skill set. Readers observe Nora’s memories, mannerisms, flaws, fears, humor, and love. And yet, like with any real person, she seems to exist beyond the reach of list-worthy qualities ... There’s an anticipatory tedium to converging narratives that Inland can’t quite overcome. For the most part, these dual stories would work just as effectively in isolation. When connections arise, they’re lovely and fitting and, inescapably, a little too neat. If anything really binds the novel, it’s a hungry longing on every page ... It seemed like too much to hope that a writer who had been praised to the skies and back, who had become the youngest ever winner of the Women’s Prize, could continue to produce in a way that lacked self-consciousness .... That Inland, a novel guaranteed to appear on every \'most anticipated\' list before a word of it had been written, could truly invest readers instead of just intriguing them. Well. What if it does?
Ali Smith
RaveOpen Letters ReviewAli Smith’s Winter reads like a collection of feathers: little moments of being brushed by a brilliant phrase or tickled by a cheeky reference, and the full weight of such moments is only felt when you stack them all together ... Like all of Smith’s books, Winter is peppered with wordplay ... Winter presents the English language in a deconstructed way, exposing just how perilously close so many words and phrases are to each other ... Told in Smith’s characteristically brisk, stream-of-consciousness style, the narrative jumps from past to future to present, from chapter to chapter and within chapters ... Smith manages something rather marvelous: She pokes fun at situations without ever becoming nasty, exposes the follies and shortcomings of her characters without judgment, and expresses concern about the state of the world without resorting to cynicism.
