RaveThe San Francisco ChronicleA larger-than-expected journey ... A funny, well-researched, personal story about the value of fabric, women’s work and local connections ... Starting down this sweater-making thread, Orenstein unravels a whole ball of yarns. She considers the enduring and cross-cultural myths of women weavers, variously goddesses or witches ... Fabric facts can be fascinating ... Orenstein counters some of the heaviness of wildfire, climate destruction and the global health crisis with her humor ... By book’s end, the reader is ready to identify deep, intrinsic beauty in anything that difficult to create. You just may need to read the book to see that.
Richard White
RaveSan Francisco ChronicleThrilling ... A true-crime thriller, revivifying a very cold case and portraying the early decades of the university ... It’s astonishing that Jane Stanford’s murder went unacknowledged for so long, and it’s equally shocking to realize how unlikely the existence of today’s Stanford University...is at all ... White is well positioned to excavate this tale. He digs deep into papers from Stanford’s archives...for context and clues ... White concludes with a convincing case fingering a killer, plus accessories after the fact ... The book is a reminder that our origin stories shape our present — and though past events can’t be changed, our interpretation of them certainly can.
Rebecca Scherm
RaveSan Francisco ChronicleRebecca Scherm’s A House Between Earth and the Moon grapples with a gaggle of red-hot current issues ... She packs them all into the powerful rocket engine of climate disaster — the biggest, baddest issue of all — and launches the whole shebang into space ... It’s a rocking ride. The novel is propulsive, captivating, touching, funny — and utterly terrifying ... It’s so frightening because this future world becomes so vividly, devastatingly real.
Shruti Swamy
RaveSan Francisco ChronicleShimmering ... Swamy’s storytelling builds almost sneakily, the narration circling and turning, all while her prose mesmerizes. Like a dancer entrancing the audience with her expressive hands while her feet propel her forward.
Sara Davis
RaveSan Francisco ChronicleContinuing with the increasingly unreliable N, the reader feels inklings of vertigo, the ground rumbling underfoot in this psychological thriller ... Within her haunting landscape and propulsive plot, she manages to introduce some morbid humor ... In these narrative gyres, Davis emerges as a legitimately skillful novelist unafraid to ask difficult questions.
