MixedNew York Times Book ReviewWhile Hannah’s plight in the novel is an easy one to sympathize with, Oates has created a character who is difficult to shadow. She has no discernible personality beyond being a privileged white woman ... \'Rarely do white mothers die in childbirth,\' she thinks, unhelpfully, when her 4-year-old daughter falls ill. \'Much more frequently, Black mothers. Can’t happen to us. No.\' This statement was one of many that pulled me out of Oates’s narrative. Why would Hannah regurgitate this simplistic demographic comparison when she is not giving birth, and her daughter is no longer an infant? ... Oates grants the odd, verbose chapter to other characters ... The Jarretts never rise above cliché ... In plot and theme, Babysitter is bleak and indulgent. Still, it is nigh impossible to fault Oates’s style. She writes beautifully. Hannah’s unreliable, elliptical narrative is seductive and compelling ... Oates masterfully manipulates the narrative timeline, without losing the reader in the process. She is in no hurry to trigger the action ... Yet despite her virtuosic storytelling, Oates is unable to resist spoon-feeding her readers ... It is as though Oates doesn’t trust readers to reach certain conclusions on their own ... Babysitter is not a novel for the faint of heart. It spares nothing in its violent account of every kind of horror one could imagine happening in a single story ... As unlikable as Hannah is, I was terrified for her, and for myself. A third of the way through the novel, it was clear that there could be no happy ending, and Oates barely ties up the loose ends. If it was her intention to leave us with more questions than answers, the effect is an acute sense of unease ... Read with care.
Kwon Yeo-Son, tr. Janet Hong
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewBy the end, the reader will know who the killer is, but that knowledge takes a back seat in this poignant tale ... A taut novella in eight vignettes, Lemon is not so much narrated as spilled, confessed, blurted out in the alternating voices of three women recalling a tragedy that took place when they were in high school ... Kwon takes advantage of the multiple perspectives at her disposal. What one narrator sees as a kindness, another shows to be an act of necessity; what one assumes is solicitation is later revealed to be reckless ... They exist more as vehicles through which the story is told than as flesh-and-blood individuals. A reader would be hard pressed to pinpoint their internal attributes or quirks. But the story is told so vividly and poetically that it doesn’t suffer much for this lack of insight ... Lemon is easy to devour in one sitting, but my advice is: Don’t. I was so focused on the murder that I almost missed another mystery unfolding right before my eyes. “Lemon” should be read slowly and closely in order to appreciate it when Kwon pulls off what I can describe only as a sleight of hand ... In Janet Hong’s translation, Kwon’s writing is masterly. Her sentences are crisp, concise and potent; just one contains as much meaning as two or three of your average storyteller’s ... Lemon, much like the fruit, is a bright, intense, refreshing story.
Zakiya Dalila Harris
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewRace politics is at the very heart of this novel. The book explores how the dynamics between Black and white people potentially distort the Black relationship — the fortified bonds and loyalties, expectations unwittingly nurtured and the indirect competition provoked ... Despite the fact that Harris uses three other points of view in this novel, I could not help but feel that the story could have benefited from an additional perspective, one that was not in agreement with the overwhelming consensus and was not immediately framed as the wrong view ... Two-thirds of the way in, The Other Black Girl takes on traits of the horror genre with a dash of magical realism. There is certainly something very Jordan Peele-esque about the plot ... as I adjusted to the new element, my bewilderment morphed into pleasure at Harris’s ingenuity and creativity ... Still, I hold the view that the somewhat fantastical element introduced — which I can’t shed more light on without completely ruining the fun — took away the agency of some of the characters in the novel ... Harris’s writing propels you forward through the story. She can deliver paragraphs of back story and inner monologue without leaving her reader feeling overwhelmed or disengaged ... Harris succeeds in capturing office machinations with a deftness and grace that brings it all to life ... I am familiar with setting, nature and objects being interpreted as character in a work of fiction, so I will take the liberty of adding hair to this canon. I could tell you the hair texture and style of every single Black character in this novel. The attention to hair was not superfluous, nor was it done carelessly; it moved the story forward ... The seriousness of the topic being handled in The Other Black Girl, and the fact that it shared some minor similarities with the horror genre, did not stand in the way of it also being bright and funny. You may not agree with every opinion or every statement laid out in this work, but you will turn page after page after page in your eagerness to unravel this unique tale.
Alexis Schaitkin
RaveThe New York Times Book Review... a fetching, charismatic, somewhat volatile heroine. One who is pure enough that you feel the enormity of her loss, but slick enough to be interesting ... All these sub-narratives dedicated to minor and major characters, chapters that do little to move the plot along, could easily have resulted in a novel that buckled under the weight of its structural ambitions, but Schaitkin pulls it off without a hitch ... hypnotic, delivering acute social commentary on everything from class and race to familial bonds and community, and yet its weblike nature never confuses, or fails to captivate. Schaitkin’s characters have views you may not always agree with, but their voices are so intelligent and distinctive it feels not just easy, but necessary, to follow them. I devoured Saint X in a day ... Perhaps intentionally, the narrative deflates a little at the end. But perhaps this was bound to happen; after spending over 300 pages trying to understand what happened on the island that night, could the reader be satisfied by any ending? Could the bereaved?
