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Ron Hansen
Mixed The Philadelphia Inquirer With The Kid, Hansen clearly aims to rely on the same design used for The Assassination of Jesse James, creating a tapestry of lyrical description, indelible images of both beauty and cruelty, and details gleaned from assiduous research ... Throughout, while the largely inaccurate legend of his ruthlessness grows, he demonstrates himself to be sensitive as well as well-spoken - not only in Hansen's imagination, but also in the letters Billy wrote to others, from which Hansen quotes occasionally, to great effect. Nevertheless, though Hansen's corrective portrait is illuminating, the novel itself, in the end, falters. Bogged down by too much historically accurate but extraneous matter, The Kid frequently sacrifices narrative momentum for the sake of pursuing seemingly every possible tangent along the way.
Donald Ray Pollack
Rave The Philadelphia Inquirer The story of the Jewett Gang eventually reaches its destination in a satisfying and surprisingly poignant manner, but it's the winding journey there that truly rewards. Pollack is both a wicked stylist and a master storyteller, who seems an endless font of wit and imagination. The Heavenly Table is a vicious, salacious, and unsettling treasure.
Annie Proulx
Positive The Philadelphia Inquirer Proulx shines brightest when focused on the details of the lives of the characters dedicated to the transformation of trees into material for human use. In her portraits of everyone from the ax swingers to the dead-water men (you'll have to read the book to learn what they do) to the surveyors to the people at the top who turn their profit-seeking attention to the monstrous kauri trees of New Zealand, her extensive research always enriches the narrative without becoming either tedious or distracting ... Barkskins is nothing if not ambitious. And Proulx is more than up to the formidable task. None of the numerous settings or centuries fails to come to life in anything less than vivid fashion. However, while the novel's enormous scale provides us with a tragic portrait of the steady and inexorable destruction of so much and so many beneath the grinding wheels of Western progress, it also prevents us from getting to know any particular character in much depth.
Ethan Canin
Pan The Philadelphia Inquirer Throughout A Doubter’s Almanac, Canin examines the drawbacks of brilliance — for both the brilliant and those who come within their orbit. For Milo, one character notes, there is no “pleasure in the company of friends. There is nothing. Nothing that might assuage the maw. He stands directly in its whirlwind. I’ve come to believe that this is the consequence of a brain like his.” Rather than challenging this romantic and melodramatic observation, Canin upholds it, for the most part, which eventually leaves little to explore with Milo, even for his own son. While this is frustrating enough, especially coming from a writer as good as Canin, what’s still more frustrating is how this novel, which is at least a hundred pages longer than it needs to be, squanders its promise. Like Milo himself, what begins with such potential ends rather feebly.
Elizabeth Strout
Rave The Philadelphia Enquirer Strout admirably refuses to fulfill our desire for the sense of truth we so desperately seek from narratives. While Lucy struggles with the inscrutable truths of others, Strout remains true to a fiction writer's most crucial mission, as explained to Lucy by a writer she admires: 'Report on the human condition. . . . Tell us who we are and what we think and what we do.'
Michael Cunningham
Positive The Philadelphia Inquirer A Wild Swan fails to achieve as much as it might have. Too many tales do too little that's either particularly innovative...In a book this slim, it's too bad the tales do not bear more weight.