MixedWashington Independent Review of Books\"The book struggles to bind [its] threads into a focused and cohesive whole, but readers can easily stay grounded, carried along by Oyeyemi’s crystalline style and vivid imagination ... Oyeyemi tackles an array of themes... and while each aspect is intriguing, readers might feel enervated by too many unresolved storylines ... Ostensibly, Boy, Snow, Bird retells \'Snow White,\' but the relationship between these two stories is insignificant... but the similarities are not specific enough to warrant the more superficial connections that Oyeyemi imposes, like references to mirrors and a character named \'Snow.\' These cute nods to \'Snow White\' are merely that: cute ... Readers wanting a sprawling tale of family secrets will be satisfied as long as they are content to let the characters keep secrets from them as well.\
Jesmyn Ward
RaveThe Washington Independent Review of BooksJesmyn Ward’s latest novel, Sing, Unburied, Sing, is a mesmerizing saga that infuses a contemporary road narrative with a timeless vitality and urgency of the likes of Toni Morrison, William Faulkner, and Jean Toomer ...an unassuming family drama but ends as a profound invocation of the human condition ...told through the voices of Jojo, Leonie, and Richie ... Each character has distinct concerns, but they all narrate with a similar heightened language full of poetic notes ...Ward’s sentences embody the rawness, the mugginess, and the intense heat of the Mississippi Gulf Coast ... What’s powerful about Sing, Unburied, Sing is not necessarily what happens in the plot, but rather what that plot signifies ...an ode to the South, but also an indictment of it.
Percival Everett
RaveThe Washington Independent Review of Books\"The three narrative threads feel disparate at the novel’s beginning, with little in common beyond their shared narrator, but they slowly begin to coalesce and inform each other, revealing and clarifying what makes Kevin tick, and what motivates him to conceal his masterpiece ... All three plotlines are markedly distinct, and this makes for a vertiginous reading experience — the stark jumps are, at first, difficult to keep up with. But the contrast creates a delightful suspense: We know Kevin gets out of these jams, but we don’t yet know how ... Author Everett writes with wit and precision. His sentences have the whimsical acrobatics of Michael Chabon, but their restraint and caution recall Denis Johnson. That is not to say that Everett isn’t his own writer, because, in fact, his distinct narrative voice is part of why So Much Blue is such a fun page-turner.\
Zadie Smith
RaveThe Washington Independent Review of Books...rich characters, complex relationships, and beautiful truths about the passage of time ... The alternating time periods have distinct concerns, but the narrator’s sharp observations and keen voice easily slides between them, distilling a consciousness that mesmerizes with passages of confession, of memory, and of working through the mess of growing up and living life ... Swing Time is not necessarily about race and class, but these politics inform every aspect of the characters’ lives. Smith handles these points with subtlety, never veering into cliché or laziness. The characters are not reduced to their demographic markers, but rather are complex people who do not deny the ways race and class and gender influence their lives ... a capacious novel: childhood, London, career woes, New York, family and friendship, West Africa, how we change over time. It contains passages of psychological and emotional insight, and it is a joy to read.
Jonathan Safran Foer
PositiveThe Washington Independent Review of BooksHere I Am is full of beautiful writing and passages of family life that are moving, challenging, and astute. The story is intricate and imaginative, and despite a plot that strains to accommodate its breadth, and despite a lacking female lead, it is memorable and worthwhile.
