About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Lucy Jones
Rave iNews (UK) An ambitious, wide-ranging work that is at once memoir, analysis and social study ... Jones details what it is like to undergo matrescence with blistering personal experience and meticulous research. She is a gifted writer ... A vital book.
Ann Patchett
Rave iNews (UK) \"Here’s the thing about Ann Patchett. Her stories are compelling and her prose is perfection. But her novels are decidedly unshowy; her personal life not nearly so lurid as some of the other contenders for the title of Great American Novelist. It’s not that she doesn’t get the recognition she deserves, rather, that there is clearly an issue with the volume at which such recognition is broadcast, perhaps because her craft is so subtle, perhaps because she is a woman; most likely both ... Her writing appears so effortless that it takes a particular exertion to step back and notice just how good she is; the brilliance of her storytelling, the way a sentence comes seemingly from nowhere to knock you to your knees. Read this book to feel young. Read it to feel old. Read, most of all, to feel blazingly and tenderly and miraculously alive.\
Charlotte Mendelson
Rave iNews (UK) Mendelson avoids asking too many questions as to why Ray is as he is, the better to focus upon the havoc he wreaks ... Mendelson is skilled at rendering the grotesque fascinating. This book would be disturbing, is disturbing, especially on the subject of masculine control, but it is also funny; so funny. Mendelson can turn a phrase and then some.
Elizabeth Day
Positive iNews (UK) The opening of Magpie is decidedly creepy ... Her handling of narrative is pacy and assured. Indeed, so compulsive is this book that there were times when, however quickly I read, it wasn’t fast enough. There is much talk on the book’s jacket about the twist, which is indeed electric, so much so that I had to go back and re-read the central section once my desire for plot had been sated ... The final third, by comparison, is less taut, although no less fascinating ... Magpie’s descriptions are often disturbingly memorable ... Day writes with hair-raising accuracy on the madnesses of fertility and pregnancy, infertility and miscarriage, love and longing ... Thank goodness that Magpie is funny, too ... It is perhaps a shame that Jake is left somewhat sketchy, as overshadowed by his mother in personality as he is by the mechanics of the plot. Marisa and Kate, too, exist more fully in their recollections of the past than they seem to in the present. Still, if we don’t ever quite seem to know these two women, at least not in the way their old friends do, perhaps that is the point.
Ann Patchett
Rave iNews (UK) Kind and generous she may be, but Patchett is capable of deploying the rapier where necessary ... If we are lucky, we will come upon someone in our lifetime who is truly good. Patchett’s writing reveals her to be such a person. Better still, she has a knack of finding this quality in everyone she meets. To immerse oneself in her book is to see the world as she does, in all its wonder and beauty. Read it, cherish it, buy a copy for your best friend, then read it once more.
Robin Sloan
Positive The Independent (UK) It’s all very hipster, which might be annoying were it not for Sloan’s lightness of touch. This is a world in which a man can own an early edition Kindle, \'so uncool it’s cool again\', a place where Google is \'developing a form of renewable energy that runs on hubris\', and where a breathy description of the internet giant’s headquarters is leavened by the appearance of \'a tall dude with blue dreadlocks pedalling a unicycle\' ... And if, in the end, the plot doesn’t entirely satisfy – the love story is a little weak, the 500-year old mystery rather too neatly solved – this novel’s ideas will linger long in the mind.