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Recent Reviews
Santiago Jose Sanchez
Positive The New York Times Book Review Sanchez renders these feelings of isolation in rich, lyrical prose. The effect is a deep sense of interiority, though it sometimes comes at the expense of clarity ... The issue is that narrative inconsistencies and omissions throughout the book, including a significant revelation delivered later on, blunt the impact of Santiago’s epiphanies.
Marie Arana
Positive The New York Times Book Review Arana’s commentary isn’t particularly revelatory. What brings her book to life is the richness of voices and perspectives ... Arana covers serious ground here in brisk, accessible prose. However, in section after section, the book’s hurried pace eventually generates the feeling of being perched on a speeding tour bus.
Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Mixed The New York Times Book Review \"This book does not linger in subtlety. The budding, slow-burn romance between Tristán and Montserrat is telegraphed from the beginning. Inner thoughts are projected to the point where revelations feel toothless, and key plot details are delivered in stiff dialogue. Moreno-Garcia couches this world in endless references to actors, directors, horror films, occultists and Mexican companies. At its best, it is a robust and haunting picture of 1990s Mexico City, its film scene hollowed out by neoliberal reforms and bad taste. Other times, the details weigh down the narrative ... After this throat-clearing is over, the novel picks up, taking on an electrifying rhythm as Moreno-Garcia’s inventive and carefully arranged supernatural mystery unravels.\
Ingrid Rojas Contreras
Positive New York Times Book Review To complete The Man Who Could Move Clouds...Rojas Contreras relies...on oral history, ultimately embracing its messy, unverifiable and disjointed nature ... These are the kinds of stories that would’ve had Gabriel García Márquez rubbing his hands together ... Sections in the memoir that expand beyond the personal into discussions of colonialism and Colombian history can feel thin. Some reflections are vague, airy, even bordering on cringe ... Others get simple facts wrong ... For a book that reveals such deep collective truths, these are merely quibbles ... Rojas Contreras has forced into the public record a collective identity of clairvoyants and spiritualists...that she has pieced together from the disintegrating fragments of her own familial past. In the process, she has written a spellbinding and genre-defying ancestral history.
Guillem Balagué
Mixed New York Times Book Review Balagué, drawing from several books, documentaries and archival clips from Spanish-language media, covers well-trodden territory ... None of which, admittedly, is particularly new. What differentiates Balagué’s biography from previous attempts is his access to members of Maradona’s inner circle, especially his longtime personal trainer, giving a fresh texture and context to Maradona’s victories and crises ... These moments, when Balagué is at his best, are rendered in highly readable, if sometimes clumsy, prose. But this biography falls short in many other ways. Any discussion of Argentine politics is strained, ham-fisted and usually treated as a vehicle for highlighting Maradona’s sometimes unifying, other times polarizing effect. His long, if disappointing, coaching career receives only fleeting mention, as does the ongoing struggle with addiction that slowly led to his death. The result is an incomplete portrait.
Rodrigo Garcia
Positive The New York Times Book Review ... poignant ... Garcia, a television and film director, provides an intimate portrait of his father as he has never been portrayed: forgetful, frustrated, despondent. García Márquez’s despair is agonizing to witness ... Garcia’s account is honest — perhaps to a fault, given the strict division his parents imposed between their public and private lives ... is in large part carried by anecdotes about García Márquez’s life, but it is most telling when Garcia is prompted to reflect on his own, and reckon with his insecurities. Over the course of writing the memoir, he becomes aware that the wall his parents constructed around their private lives also extended, in part, to him.