About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Annabelle Tometich
Positive The New York Times Book Review \"In reclaiming Josefina from the mug shot and clickbait headlines that followed her arrest, the author opens the door to something even more lasting, and possibly more severe: a daughter’s unflinching gaze ... Keeping us close to the child’s-eye view of her formidable mother and the tragedies that befall their family — including her father’s sudden, mysterious death when Tometich was 9 — yields moments of unexpected humor and stinging truth. She writes scene and dialogue with the metronomic precision of a seasoned broadsheet reporter, her ledes and kickers often bearing a sly, precocious slant ... Tometich’s reclamation of the mother whose jailing she fantasized about as a child hinges on a dawning sense of her own internalized shame. \'The justice system does not see her as a whole person, worthy of leniency and redemption,\' Tometich writes, late in the book, of the harshness of Josefina’s punishment. \'And up until this point, neither did I.\' The reader clamors for a sense of what has proceeded from that reckoning, a story as yet untold.\
Tricia Romano
Rave The New Yorker Raucous ... Unfolds like the kind of epic, many-roomed party that invokes the spirit of other parties and their immortal ghosts ... Most chapters offer an inside history of familiar events.
Mary Gabriel
Mixed The New Yorker Suggests something comprehensive: it is eight hundred and eighty pages ... Light on author interviews and other new source material, the biography is a towering work of assemblage ... Gabriel avoids risk and complication as fervently as Madonna has sought them out, spinning modest threads of historical, political, and cultural context that are never less than perfectly apt and rarely anything more ... Though Gabriel emphasizes the relationships that have helped midwife Madonna’s work, she fails to make them intelligible: we get no sense of the artist’s grind, her habits and challenges as a songwriter, singer, producer, dancer, or director; or of how her vision and her ear have prevailed, in a decades-long evolution, through countless co-productions and genre dalliances. Old press-tour quotes on this subject are as illuminating as you might expect.
Violaine Huisman
Rave The New York Time Book Review This is tricky terrain for a writer of personal history, who must rely on the sensational details she seeks to transcend. In her description of maternal horrors and ecstasies, Huisman strikes an airy tone, confiding yet remote and prone to comic understatement ... That the madness of Violaine’s childhood left her \'deeply marked\' is both hardly in doubt and not the subject of this tender, searching book. Instead, the daughter figures as both a character in her mother’s story and its teller, taking one last survey of the wreckage, as if her own life depends on it.
Rachel Monroe
Mixed Bookforum ... probing, recursive ... A magazine writer known for her laser-cut dissections of cresting cultural phenomena, Monroe brings a rare form of joy to her reporting: Her best pieces combine a focused effort to nail down a good story and a more expansive instinct toward unraveling, questioning, showing her work. Writing about social-media hucksters, dating-app con men, and new-old wellness elixirs, she exhibits a gift—perhaps prized even more by editors than it is among journalists—for the precise interval at which a sort-of thing is ready to become a full-on thing, to be caught mid-microcurrent, skillfully examined, and released into the slightly wider waterways that now pass for the mainstream ... The chapters are discrete, linked chiefly by their interest in the context Monroe expands by a sort of narrative stealth, broadening with each stroke our sense of the world within which women in particular might seek not just entertainment or relief but purpose in a carefully wrought proximity to crime ... Monroe’s lithe critical intelligence is the chief binding agent of chapters that wander and digress.
Lisa Taddeo
Positive Bookforum That Taddeo is most fascinated by stories of female romantic and sexual abjection squarely in the Victorian mold is one complicating factor in a book framed as an immersive report on the current state of female desire ... Three Women reads like a work of psychological realism, every page showcasing the author’s radical empathy and almost occult communion with her subjects. Taddeo generally uses limited-third-person narration, moving freely between the subjects’ experience and their psyches. There is an unnerving charge ... If her approach is often distracting—rarely is such an effaced narrator this overbearing—Taddeo, who also writes fiction, is a master of character ... My own self-consciousness tended to rise in proportion to Taddeo’s success: The frothier the melodrama and purer the voyeuristic frisson, the stronger the impulse to watch myself as a reader, to clock and wonder at my own responses ... Taddeo is a savage observer of interpersonal economies of power, the market values of age, flesh, gender, social status, class ... Are there women, really? Are there at least three of them? Read as an answer to that question, Three Women is an ambivalent document: involving, granular, and brilliantly observed as drama, but too scattered to mobilize concepts as vast and abstruse as gender and desire. Read untroubled by questions of gender essentialism, the book is a triumph, affirming as worthy of considered, compassionate study the intimate lives of everyday women.
Marilynne Robinson
Positive Bookforum Robinson’s genius is for making indistinguishable the highest ends of faith and fiction, evoking in her characters and her readers the paradox by which an individual, enlarged by the grace of God, or art, acquires selfhood in acquiring a sense of the world beyond the self—the sublime apprehension that other people exist … Rolling between the title character’s present and her preceding decades of roaming, Lila parallels a coming into selfhood with an equally ambivalent coming into faith … Throughout Lila and its predecessors, Robinson elucidates the struggle to reconcile likeness and original; temporal and eternal; memory and reality; physical and ephemeral; flame and wick—a struggle as productive as it is without ultimate hope.
Jhumpa Lahiri
Positive Bookforum Lovely, frank, fascinating—personal and startling ... a record of creative and linguistic restlessness, the culmination of an encounter that Lahiri likens to love at first sight.
David Searcy
Rave The New York Times Book Review ...each of these essays is itself a kind of extended moment, within which Searcy pauses, turns ideas about, attempts to take it all in. Unstructured yet well fortified, Searcy’s long, hanging moments take on the contours of a rare, desperately private space. To join him there is to be astonished.