RaveTimes Literary Supplement (UK)The disintegration is engrossingly extreme and appropriately public ... Bishop’s presiding achievement in The Anniversary is to have created a psychologically layered landscape that simultaneously holds in suspension and keeps in play the crime-genre structure of the book – with its sudden death, investigation, evasions and reckoning all ultimately accomplished. She weaves J. B.’s present woes with memories of her stormy marriage and a shattering disappearance that disrupted her childhood, resulting in similarly unexpected intrusions of the police, press and public. The author accomplishes this feat via a smooth shuttling from present to past ... Stephanie Bishop honours the feminist spin she puts on the crime genre by revisiting the on-deck fight, revealing the underlying reason for her narrator’s disappointment.
Ronan Farrow
PositiveThe Times Literary Supplement...NBC increasingly obstructed Farrow’s reporting, which adds a layer of intrigue to Catch and Kill. It doesn’t hurt that he has a fiction-writer’s flare for characterization ... The most unusual aspect of Farrow’s account, though, is the pushback he gets from NBC supervisors as the story gains momentum. Editors in books about journalistic triumph are usually high-minded, dedicated and supportive. Kantor and Twohey’s are nothing but admirable. Farrow has a very different experience.
Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey
PositiveThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)... a relatively straightforward account ... how Kantor and Twohey tracked people down and coaxed them into participating are the most involving aspects of the book ... If a bit stagey, the [last] chapter nicely reprises issues surrounding disclosure and the public scrutiny that follows.
Margot Livesy
PositiveThe Wall Street Journal'...while she clearly enjoys pop-novelist techniques, with all the suspension of disbelief they require, Ms. Livesey rarely gives in to stock characterizations or mere page-turning titillation. She’s a patient builder of complex characters who are often brought face to face with uncomfortable truths about themselves ... The best-seller lists are full of slapdash if rousing plots. Margot Livesey sometimes finds a place on those lists, and Mercury is not a bad candidate. That a gun goes off at a crucial moment, however, is not the reason to pick it up. Intricately convincing relationships, and accomplished sentence-making, are.
Lionel Shriver
RaveThe Wall Street JournalThe Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047, full of discussions of economic policy and the efficacy or not of the gold standard, nevertheless contains Jane Austen-like dissections of class distinction and grandly satirical swipes at foodies and oenophiles. It’s also a provocative and very funny page-turner ... Ms. Shriver has good fun with futurisms, including the continuing reign over Russia by Vladimir Putin, 'Mr. President for Life'; a U.S. presidential primary whose challenger is 'leftwing grandee Jon Stewart'; and a tempered use of invented slang ... Ms. Shriver skillfully foregrounds Willing’s perspective, a narratively charged vantage point from which morality takes a back seat to survival ... The future is grim, but Ms. Shriver with characteristically sardonic humor keeps things from getting heavy-handed.
Richard Russo
MixedThe Wall Street JournalFor all its pleasures, however, Everybody’s Fool is a sequel, with a sequel’s repetitions. Mr. Russo revisits greatest hits, retelling in capsule form stories of Sully and son’s doping of a Doberman at a construction yard and a teenager’s impalement on a wrought-iron fence. He brings back old jokes, including Sully’s relentless teasing of foolish Rub. And he trots out bit players that were entertaining in and crucial to the previous novel but are superfluous here...More worrisome are early signs that, like all sequels, this one will compensate for lack of invention—most of the characters and their fictional world having already been built—with amped-up action.
