RaveFiction Writers Review\"I was initially drawn to The Golden State because it was billed as a compelling portrait of modern parenting in a complicated world, but it’s Kiesling’s feast of form that makes a familiar topic fresh ... I’ve seen other writers capture the emotional or physical experience of parenting in astute and illuminating ways, but rarely one who has captured it at the structural level of the sentence in quite the same way ... The Golden State is a compelling story and a brutally unromantic portrait of modern motherhood, but it’s also glowing at the sentence level in its intention ... Lydia Kiesling is accomplishing a treatment of motherhood that lives in and through language, elevating a moment in a mother’s life from the banal to the beautiful.\
Rumaan Alam
PositiveFiction Writers ReviewThat Kind of Mother is refreshingly complicated ... Specifically, Alam’s novel asks readers to examine the relationship between how we construct and project \'motherhood\' as an identity with notions of the limitations and constrictions of this identity ... It is the undertaking, after all, not the state of being that truly defines motherhood, a notion Alam captures marvelously in this book.
