About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Jeff VanderMeer
Rave The Los Angeles Times \"VanderMeer is a gifted writer. He uses his beautiful prose — sometimes muscular, sometimes lyrical — in service to his brand of ecological-horror science fiction that asks probing questions of human nature ... Some readers may anticipate that Absolution will answer all the plot mysteries of the Southern Reach series. Well … \'abandon all hope, ye who enter here.\' VanderMeer doesn’t write to unscramble characters’ conundrums or point the future in an implied trajectory. This is not a book I would recommend for readers who want solid ground beneath their feet. Readers willing to forgo such conventions are in for a treat.\
Sarah Moss
Rave The Los Angeles Times \"When she teases apart the structural underpinnings that prescribe gender, her analytical skills are breathtaking. When she lets those structures tumble and gives voice to the child raised in a spartan emotional wasteland, she broke my heart ... Moss goes back into a dark past to bring forth childhood memories. Setting that childhood voice free comes at a cost. A second voice, rendered in italics, constantly challenges her memories, berating her for making up stories. She alternates that vulnerability with her mature intellect, which sees that the literature she read to escape actually enforced British imperialism’s moral values of racial superiority, robust physical health and modest womanhood.\
Sarah Labrie
Rave The Los Angeles Times \"LaBrie brings a piercing astuteness and sensitive voice to the dilemma raised by the writer’s desire to tell a story. Trying to separate a family’s fictions from its realities is to enter locked closets full of redacted memories and erased stories that have been overwritten to hide the truth. Mental illness, despite our increased understanding of its causes and etiology, still causes shame. It can make a person doubt herself, make her question whether her perceptions are evidence of her own diseased mind. For a writer, the related ability to imaginatively interpret reality is turned inward.\
Helen Macdonald
Rave Salon This is one of those books bound to be a classic of nature writing, offering examples of sentences so shimmering I found myself halting in order to copy them down into my journal.