RaveLos Angeles Times\"... Yan skillfully renders — both realistically and surrealistically — the nightmarish story ... Effortlessly blending metaphor and allegory, symbolism and satire, Yan has crafted a distinct literary work of dystopian satire, a blend of bruising bureaucratic critique with a sly postmodern pastiche of realism, absurdism and the grotesque ... The novel is a tour de force of language control. Rojas has honored all of Yan’s vertiginous syntax, with its switchbacks and echoes, its rhythms and recursions, inducing a spell like a hypnotist’s watch swinging back and forth, lowering our defenses against its control ... The magnificence of Niannian’s narration is that it can be read on many levels.\
Justin Torres
RaveThe New York Times Sunday Book Review...a strobe light of a story, its flash set on slow, producing before our eyes lurid and poetic snapshots ... Like Fitzgerald’s Nick Carraway...Torres’s sensitive and hyperobservant narrator...claims to be \'both inside and outside,\' relating this coming-of-age story in a spare and impressionistic style that lasts nearly to the very end, when the strobe light’s pace suddenly quickens and careens us, headlong and a bit jarringly, into unexpected betrayal and rupture. Revealing secrets and changing lives at the end of a story serves an author — and reader — best when we get a little more setup than Torres has offered. But this critique actually speaks to my own hunger and want. I want more of Torres’s haunting, word-torn world — not less.
Justin Cronin
PositiveThe New York Times Sunday Book ReviewEvery new vampire story absorbs and reconfigures the tradition, as Justin Cronin aptly demonstrates in The Twelve — the second installment to a vampire trilogy that began in 2010 with Cronin’s blockbuster novel The Passage. If that book was a bit twee at times, it was also smart, well crafted and entertaining. Fans will be happy to learn that The Twelve delivers much of the same vitality and vision. Like its predecessor, it is a strange new creature for the 21st century: the literary superthriller, driven at once by character and plot … Putting us back at Year Zero may feel slightly regressive in a sequel of this scope, but Kittridge’s ordeal nonetheless enthralls. Though there’s nothing here quite like the artful and plaintive first third of The Passage, these human relationships remain well developed and emotionally affecting.
David Duchovny
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewIn a short early chapter, we follow Ted, after a game, into the changing room, where he takes off his work uniform (a cardboard box with shoulder straps made to look like a peanut bag) and dons his 'life uniform' (tie-dye shirt, bluejeans and sandals). In terms of dramatic action, that’s pretty much all that happens, but in terms of character background, Duchovny brings us so close to Ted we feel as though we might have caught a contact buzz...But when Ted gets a phone call from a grief counselor at Beth Israel hospital, telling him that his long-estranged father, Marty, is dying of lung cancer, both Ted and the novel pick up the pace. From there, Duchovny finds his rhythm, balancing crisp dialogue with some truly hilarious scenes that draw on the small cast of colorful secondary characters.
