PositiveSeven Days VTLesson in Red is at its best when Hummel shows how the art scene fits into the city\'s larger cultural ecosystem ... A transporting follow-up to Hummel\'s breakout novel.
Alison Bechdel
RaveSeven Days... full of this sort of playful imagery, making it clear that Bechdel sees the funny side of such pronouncements ... reflects the cyclical, rambling nature of her quest, and some readers may be frustrated by the lack of a more definitive catharsis ... But what Bechdel\'s words can\'t always supply, her drawing does. Each section of the book covers a decade of the author\'s life and closes with a glorious two-page watercolor. In these lyrical images, the heroine recedes into the landscape, and the universality of her quest comes into sharp relief ... funny, relatable, beautifully and expressively colored, and equipped with a hilarious illustrated rundown of the \'The Semi-Sadistic 7-Minute Workout.\' Fellow self-improvers won\'t find the secret to superhuman strength here, but they might end up a little less sheepish about being human.
Katherine Forbes Riley
RaveSeven Days... it\'s oddly refreshing to encounter a hookless book that develops at its own stubborn pace and sucks you in anyway ... meticulously crafted sentences ... both a literary novel and an unapologetic romance, taking a plot that Nicholas Sparks could probably have cashed in on and twisting it into something darker and more complex ... Toward the end, The Bobcat\'s plot veers in a speculative direction that isn\'t entirely successful, and Riley sometimes goes too far in depicting the mainstream world as grotesque and hostile. But then, that\'s how Laurelie and the hiker experience it ... Riley\'s prose sparkles and cracks with its own kind of power. Like a visit to the den of the titular bobcat, her novel makes us feel like we\'ve witnessed something private, untamed and perhaps a little sacred.
