About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Laura van den Berg
Rave The New York Times Book Review All the women in this collection are uncertain observers, hyperaware yet unable to divine meaning until it’s too late ... Thankfully, the realistic doesn’t carry much cachet in these stories. Wonder and mystery are recurring motifs. The women here are one step ahead of disaster or one step behind it, and either way they are eager to discover what’s next ... Van den Berg, in this wonderful collection, never lets us turn away.
Will Boast
Positive The New York Times Book Review Boast seems to have captured today’s cultural zeitgeist ... Daphne...toughens up by watching a loop of heart-wrenching videos of global disasters and starving children on the internet. It’s difficult to feel compassion for Daphne’s condition given her brutal coping strategies. However, even the best-laid plans are no match for the heart. Daphne meets and falls in love with Ollie ... Their romance provides the novel’s first opportunity for the reader to empathize with Daphne — love and sex are tricky for all of us ... Her plight is universal; risk losing control over one’s own life by embracing human intimacy, or remain in the safe isolation of a hermetically sealed existence.
Elizabeth Strout
Rave The Portland Oregonian Living beneath a shadow of loss and blame around their father's death when they were small children, Jim and Bob escaped their home state of Maine for New York as soon as they possibly could. Yet ties to home and family supersede their desire to break free. This tension drives the novel as the brothers grapple with their relationship, their midlife identities and a rising family crisis … [Strout] is a master storyteller. Through the lens of this particular family history, The Burgess Boys grapples with identity, marriage, race, immigration, class, and politics. A keen observer who writes gorgeous, clean prose, she brings the situation and her characters to life with intense emotions and hugely satisfying moments of surprise.
Edan Lepucki
Mixed The Portland Oregonian Much of their existence in the forest, the ‘afterlife’ as Frida calls it, is colored by their yearnings for the past and the memories of their families, particularly Frida's charismatic brother, Micah. This two-placedness, the hardscrabble afterlife where a harvest of a few beets equals dinner, rubbing up against the ever-present memories of past luxuries, drives the narrative … As the dark story of the missing children is revealed, the couple begins to keep strange and unnecessary secrets from one another. The lies and omissions are a plot necessity and don't arise organically from the characters who fight and make up again and again. In fact the withholding feels childish and manipulative. Arguing and making up becomes exhausting, even in this beautifully rendered dystopian landscape … Lepucki has done a marvelous job creating and populating a near future that is, unfortunately for us, pretty easy to accept.
Ruth Ozeki
Rave The Portland Oregonian So begins and ends A Tale for the Time Being, Ruth Ozeki's rich and engaging new novel. Two women on different continents have written these words, one in a diary and one in a letter ... This binary novel alternates between the two women and their search for meaning in their lives, but it is Nao's sections that drive the narrative. Ruth, like us, is captivated by Nao's voice. She adds copious footnotes (163) and appendices to Nao's story, creating a virtual yet incredibly intimate conversation between diarist and reader, and thus exploring the fluid dynamic of good literature. Ozeki blurs the distinction between writer and reader... this satisfying novel is about discovering home in the moment, or now, and also home within ourselves.
Edna O'Brien
Rave The San Francisco Chronicle ...a tour de force on the atrocities we humans commit and fall prey to, as well as an exploration of suffering and the curative power of story.
Mary Gaitskill
Rave The Oregonian Thank goodness Gaitskill wrote this book, for it is neither Disneyfied nor dark but a beautiful coming-of-age novel about love and violence with a soupçon of redemption tossed in.