PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewGenerous, unblinking ... Hurley stipples Nora’s story, which alternates between a harrowing past and an unsettled present, with erudition ... If moments read overly cinematic, and stretches of dialogue improbably polished, Nora’s endeavors to learn the fates of her family and the cult, even as she knows she must exorcise both from her life, give thoughtful voice to the power of doctrine.
Ramona Ausubel
MixedThe New York Times Book ReviewSustained sorrow...underpins Ramona Ausubel’s new novel ... Ironically, the book also manages to be a mirthful romp of chicanery and derring-do ... Ausubel grips her reader’s hand firmly, constantly dropping blunt reminders of her tale’s ideas and stripping them of nuance. While the family’s revelations are deeply felt, and the book’s concerns authentic, misty-eyed pronouncements run riot.
Nathacha Appanah, trans. Geoffrey Strachan
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewSlim but full-blooded ... The profundity of Appanah’s tale, sensitively translated by Geoffrey Strachan, emerges from a puckish mix of the fairy tale...and the meta ... Free indirect discourse, in which seemingly omniscient narration slips slyly into a character’s limited perspective, colludes with self-assured direct address — “we must not forget…” — to insist that characters’ insights, like so many of our own, shouldn’t be relied on. All is shot through with a mournful lyricism ... As the family’s situation refuses to resolve easily, the book’s sincerity glows anew.
Leigh Newman
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewWe are all marching toward our demise, the title of Newman’s collection reminds us. But, as these vivid tales make clear, it is our \'flinty, fearsome resolve\' for survival that gives us life.
Alexander MacLeod
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewThe tales in this exquisite collection, set largely in Canada, are expertly paced and finely observed ... Many of MacLeod’s stories turn on a volcanic moment — a family’s brush with a serial killer or a boy’s sexual assault. But the author places much of his trust in the value of detail divorced from plot ... His eye is severe but not unfair, venerating the mingled beauty and horror of entangled existences.
Ladee Hubbard
RaveThe New York Time Book ReviewThe 13 stories in Ladee Hubbard’s new collection chart, with wisdom and sensitivity, nearly two decades of life in a Southern Black community ... Hubbard’s narration pulses with poeticism, although in its efforts to inform it can slip into the flat parlance of public-policy briefs. Still, the collection burns with unassailable truths, and many tales are less a lament than a roguish tribute to spirit and ingenuity.
David Wroblewski
MixedThe New York Times Sunday Book ReviewDavid Wroblewski, in his ambitious first novel, uses the framework of Shakespeare’s tragedy to grant that patient dog its day … Wroblewski’s literary skill is most apparent in his intoxicating descriptions of the bucolic setting … He handles his task with impressive subtlety, even when allowing the narrative a dog’s-eye view. But while sections of this book achieve a piercing elegance, the novel too often slides into the torpid mode of field guides and breeding manuals, with Wroblewski’s penchant for detail getting in the way of a full exploration of his characters’ emotional cores.
PositiveThe New York Times Sunday Book Review...a 766-page doorstop, a dystopian epic that’s the first installment in a projected vampire trilogy … While it relies at times on convention, The Passage is astutely plotted and imaginative enough to satisfy the most bloodthirsty reader … Cronin leaps back and forth in time, sprinkling his narrative with diaries, e-mail messages, maps, newspaper articles and legal documents. Sustaining such a long book is a tough endeavor, and every so often his prose slackens into inert phrases. For the most part, though, he artfully unspools his plot’s complexities, and seemingly superfluous details come to connect in remarkable ways.
Colum McCann
PanThe Washington PostPetit hovers on the edges, a spectral force employed to accentuate both the splendor that humans can create as well as the muck that constitutes our quotidian lives. McCann's forlorn cast seeks to empower themselves, to swap the muck for the splendor … The author is not known to cut narrow slices, and here he wants to glorify life's interconnectedness … McCann can craft penetrating phrases but his theme is stale, and the exhaustive back stories he gives each character never pay off. McCann relies on streams of short sentences that can seem lazy and distracted.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
RaveThe New York Times Sunday Book ReviewAdichie is an extraordinarily self-aware thinker and writer, possessing the ability to lambaste society without sneering or patronizing or polemicizing. For her, it seems no great feat to balance high-literary intentions with broad social critique … Many of Adichie’s best observations regard nuances of language. When people are reluctant to say ‘racist,’ they say ‘racially charged.’ The phrase ‘beautiful woman,’ when enunciated in certain tones by certain haughty white women, undoubtedly means ‘ordinary-looking black woman’ … Ifemelu and Obinze represent a new kind of immigrant, ‘raised well fed and watered but mired in dissatisfaction.’ They aren’t fleeing war or starvation but ‘the oppressive lethargy of choicelessness.’
