RaveBookPageThis is a hopeful book from an author who is known for dark, violent stories, which makes it both a delightful surprise and a balm in difficult times.
Susanna Clarke
RaveBookPagePiranesi centers on a strange, haunting world and features a main character whose earnest goodwill is piercingly endearing ... Piranesi hits many of the same pleasure points as Jonathan Strange—Clarke’s dazzling feats of world building, for one ... Lavishly descriptive, charming, heartbreaking and imbued with a magic that will be familiar to Clarke’s devoted readers, Piranesi will satisfy lovers of Jonathan Strange and win her many new fans.
Kate Zambreno
RaveBookPage... a kind of inverted mindfulness exercise in book form, fixed on pinning moments down like so many butterflies. Zambreno has abstained from the novelist’s traditional task of keeping a story arc aloft ... If this sounds like veiled criticism, it isn’t, though it probably should be taken as a warning to anyone hungry for more conventional fare. But for readers in the mood for an adventure, this is a giddily enjoyable read, emotionally conspiratorial in tone, full of brilliant critical observations and realistic depictions of the dramas in a modern artist’s daily life, the small ones as well as the life-altering ones.
Alexis Schaitkin
RaveBookPage... magnetic ... a nuanced examination of class, privilege and the terrible ways that tragedy can echo forward in time. Schaitkin embellishes a strong plot with psychologically complex main characters and a chorus of devastatingly incomplete narratives from peripheral characters about what really took place on Saint X. This is a must-read for fans of literary suspense.
Jennine Capó Crucet
RaveChapter 16... equal parts funny and devastating ... With tenderness, humor and unflinching candor, Crucet explores a wide spectrum of the first-generation American experience from the unique perspective of a Cuban American born and raised in Miami ... Crucet’s point of view is fearless and funny, and while she doesn’t shy away from calling out inequity, bigotry and dysfunction from all quarters, she also treats the people, places and situations that populate her personal history with gentleness and respect. My Time Among the Whites offers an astute and moving account of the experience of otherness in white America.
Jami Attenberg
RaveBookPageWeaving together a riotous assortment of threads—the stories of three generations of Tuchmans as well as a smattering of other characters pulled into their orbit—Attenberg tenderly mines their family history and massive dysfunction not for clues as to what created the monstrous Victor but for what a monster can create in spite of himself. Her characters—flawed, defensive, overwhelmed and frequently endearing—fizz off the page. Their inner lives coalesce beautifully into a funny and heart-stirring tribute to the nutty inscrutability of belonging to a family.
Leah Hager Cohen
PositiveBookPage...[an] elegantly abbreviated family saga ... Cohen’s characters are familiar in their failings and lovable in their tender quirks. Her writing style and tone lend a lightweight grace to at-times heavy subject matter—a levity not flippant or callow but held aloft by a sense of time’s two-dimensional circularity and history’s Faulknerian indefatigability. Cohen’s gentle philosophizing reminds us that while the past may not even be past, and the future often feels dangerously obscure, the present—bountifully populated by both strangers and cousins—offers its own rewards, if we choose to embrace them.
Lydia Fitzpatrick
RaveBookPageLights All Night Long is that rare work of fiction that gathers page-turning momentum from its prose as much as its plot. Fitzpatrick’s writing, accessible yet exquisite, relies on surgically precise metaphors for a lot of heavy emotional lifting ... Darkly beautiful, melancholic but not bleak, Lights All Night Long is storytelling at its finest. Fitzpatrick has written a compelling novel full of intimately portrayed, easy-to-love characters whose spoiled joys and resurgent hopes will linger with readers.
Marc Perrusquia
RaveThe Knoxville News Sentinel...a riveting glimpse into Memphis history. The book recounts the origins of the city’s racial unrest and outlines its incontrovertible victimization of the black community. It offers both specific and atmospheric background to the sanitation strike of 1968 and the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Perrusquia’s account also clears much brush from the direct path between what many Memphians would prefer to regard as ancient history and the social and economic problems which persist there today. The book is part social history, part scintillating biography, and part investigative-journalism procedural — and an all-around rousing read.
