About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Nina Sharma
Rave The Washington Post \"The sweeping but focused collection demonstrates Sharma’s commitment to exploring Afro-Asian intimacy in all its beauty and complexity ... Sharma incisively considers the “nothingness of whiteness”: the luxury White people are accorded to make \'something out of nothing,\' while Black and Brown stories are always expected to make a statement ... Sharma’s debut is remarkable for its daring, how unafraid it is to eschew rosy visions of racial solidarity. She interrogates the ongoing anti-Blackness of her family, even after her marriage to Quincy, refusing to glaze the collection with the banal optimism that assumes all people of color have joined forces to avenge racism.\
Paul Theroux
Positive Los Angeles Review of Books Although more straightforward in plot than Tan’s novel, Burma Sahib is a much denser work. Theroux conjures the minutiae of Orwell’s life, including the names of people who exist only as footnotes in his biography.
Tan Twan Eng
Positive Los Angeles Review of Books Tan’s talent as a writer is obvious: his prose is lush and effortless, though it sometimes borders on being overwrought.
Vauhini Vara
Rave The Boston Globe \"If Vauhini Vara were to deliver a eulogy at a funeral, it would be stark, forging mountains of heartbreak with sparing, skeletal words. At the same time, it would be hilarious, peppered with quips so subtle that they linger quietly, only appreciated in hindsight ... While graphic, these images are far from gratuitous. If anything, they serve to illuminate the ugliness of being a person in the world—ostensibly the larger point of This Is Salvaged, which boldly asks: how, despite life’s indignities, do we make meaning from it? ... a slender collection at 180 pages, but hangs heavy with a profundity that only Vara, a master of thrifty syntax, can deliver so gracefully.\
Geetanjali Shree, trans. by Daisy Rockwell
Mixed The Washington Post Meandering ... Reading the English translation of Shree’s novel is, at times, like wading through a sandstorm ... Even for a reader familiar with Indian culture and Hindi, extricating oneself from the novel’s many tangents — rife with platitudes that are irrelevant at best and pontificating at worst — proves difficult. The rambling plot and vast range of characters, often identified only by their title in relation to Ma...risk losing readers ... Rockwell aims to mimic the dhwani in the English translation, tossing phrases like \'fume fume fume,\' “\'ove-shove,\' and \'sputtering stuttering\' onto a single page. But the effort can sometimes read as sophomoric, even silly ... For her part, Shree is cut from a different cloth, unabashedly paving her own path through the sandstorm of writers pining for Western acclaim. Rockwell aims to keep up, but \'translation is a tricky business.\'
Candice Carty-Williams
Positive The Washington Post An homage to the vibrancy of south London’s Black community, the novel features a slate of protagonists who attest to the city’s cosmopolitanism and the spectrum of Black identity ... The array of Black identities, personalities and body types Carty-Williams depicts is refreshing and honest, a far cry from hackneyed media portrayals that present Blackness as a monolith ... A novel for the digital age, People Person seamlessly weaves technology into its roving plot ... Moments of laugh-out-loud prose punctuate the novel ... Carty-Williams deftly addresses anti-Black racism and microaggressions, while harnessing the power of comedy to drive her point home ... But, sometimes the writing feels exceedingly casual, with the cadence of a text message exchange rather than a work of literary fiction. At such moments, Carty-Williams leans on exposition over sensory description ... The ambition behind Carty-Williams’s novel calls to mind what Zadie Smith brought to her first novel, White Teeth. And to some extent, Carty-Williams is to south London what Smith is to the north: a sharp, humorous voice that paints greater London’s Black communities with the nuance they deserve ... But Smith’s ability to thread a series of disparate events together is less assured in Carty-Williams’s novel, which devotes too much time to its exposition. And minor tangents, like a protracted explanation of Danny’s prison stint, distract from Carty-Williams’s ultimate message about the importance of family ... Nevertheless, through her nuanced portrayal of the Pennington siblings, Carty-Williams deftly grapples with the unique challenges they face as Black Londoners. Among them are overcoming White beauty conventions, resisting the looming threat of unjust treatment by police and learning to love themselves as they are — with or without Cyril’s coveted affection.
Namrata Poddar
Mixed The Los Angeles Times ... a strenuous effort, at times urgent and revealing but ultimately showing the limits of Poddar’s ambition to give everyone a voice ... At its core, “Border Less” is a glimpse into contemporary, cosmopolitan India and its diaspora, which, true to the title, feel boundless ... Billed as a novel, Border Less reads more like a linked short-story collection, each chapter a window into a different character’s life and social position ... It is along some of the more minor tangents that Poddar stumbles; stories glimpsing the lives of servants, patriarchs and a fourth-generation Indo-African woman who feels isolated from her second-generation Indian American husband add little to the plot and disappear without a trace. They can also feel heavy-handed, as in the coming-out story of a lesbian Gujarati daughter, which reads like an obligatory inclusion of questionable relevance ... The feeling of checking boxes runs deeper than that. The term \'American\' remains frustratingly vague throughout Border Less — echoing Lahiri’s oeuvre, in which American implies white ... the trope of a scandalous Hindu-Muslim love affair feels tired at best ... In such instances the novel-as-collage, by pointing to itself, fails to justify the experiment. But in a larger sense (and when better employed), Poddar’s scattered storytelling is arguably a matter of form meeting function, a necessary tool to uncover the fragmented realism of modern-day Mumbai and the mishmash cities ... Poddar’s debut sheds light on the inextricable networks that make up cosmopolitan India, its California spinoffs and the cyclical, multigenerational journey from there to here and back again.
Grace D. Li
Positive The Boston Globe ... renders Cambridge in all its autumnal vibrancy ... adventurous beyond its whirlwind of a plot ... Direct references to the coronavirus punctuate the novel, while its enduring legacies — Zoom calls and habitual social distancing among them — are seamlessly woven into the book’s pages ... Li’s writing feels raw and vulnerable, resonating with many children of immigrants whose desperation to succeed in their family’s eyes is at odds with their quest for unconditional self-worth ... Still, the fact that all five protagonists attend universities ranked among the country’s top 20 makes it difficult to empathize with their anxiety over their futures ... one wonders if the novel would have been more representative of diverse Chinese American experiences had Li included a broader range of educational and class backgrounds ... At times, the writing feels heavy-handed and ekphrastic. Li often gives short sentences and fragments their own lines, aiming to convey stakes that appear momentous but ultimately fall flat ... Sometimes, the sexual tension between characters feels gratuitous ... Li unapologetically weaves Chinese idioms into her novel, like “拔苗助长,” rightfully refusing to provide verbatim translations ... The novel wraps too neatly when the crew finds a way to repatriate the stolen art without actually visiting all five museums. But there’s nevertheless something gratifying about justice served, especially when long overdue. In Portrait of a Thief, Li invites readers along for a ride in the crew’s roving getaway car, promising breathtaking vistas and, more importantly, a reckoning with colonial legacies that have long lingered in the shadows.
Sindya Bhanoo
Rave The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Reconceptualizes the great American road trip, centering Indian immigrants—particularly, Tamil women—and their children as its drivers and passengers ... The journeys...carry readers across the vast American landscape, transcending state boundaries and biomes to stitch a narrative mosaic, its patches cut from distinct corners of the country ... Bhanoo tackles complexity with a light hand. The writing is lush and sensory ... With Seeking Fortune Elsewhere and its glimpse into the lives of Tamil immigrants, Bhanoo artfully extends the burgeoning South Asian American literary canon’s trajectory\