RaveThe NationThere is a rhythm to Danielle Evans’s writing that can, on the surface, betray the tensions roiling beneath the stories she tells. She writes about the haunting nature of memory, grief, and desire with a piercing subtlety that refuses any sort of cliché terms of closure ... Evans’s narrative style is one of precision, oscillating between the first- and close-third-person perspectives. Such tightness allows her to get underneath the sadness or trauma or regret or anger her characters wear. They are followed by their ghosts, and this propels them into action, for better or for worse ... There is a frailty to resolution that rejects prescription or guarantee. Tending to this fragility is part of Evans’s mastery, and it just might be the way to traverse the gap.
Sarah M. Broom
PositiveThe NationTo plot...quiet truths that lurk beneath the surface of our myths is a process that requires a particular sense of cartography—one that implicates the people who have made us just as it does the places that deeply inform our sense of self. Broom’s The Yellow House reckons with this task as it tells a sprawling story of a house, a city, and a family ... At times Broom wades, perhaps a bit too deeply, into the ancillary occurrences of her chorus. She is at her sharpest when she confronts her own relationships to this house, in this city, and the tensions each site holds for her ... Sometimes, Broom concludes, you cannot return home with resolve, but rather only with questions to be answered. This book is Broom’s outpouring.
