PositiveThe Minneapolis Star TribuneThe first time I read Kristi Coulter’s Nothing Good Can Come From This, I am sipping from a glass — a small glass! — of rosé. I am on vacation. It is summer. Someone offered it to me, and I am very polite. Later, I’ll e-mail a friendly professional acquaintance about \'drinks!\' For an exceedingly light drinker, I am startlingly like the women Coulter is talking about ... A series of meandering essays ... Most of the pieces here end with a newfound appreciation of simplicity, and while that is a revelation, it is perhaps not a revelation every time. But if the essays are not all singularly earth-shattering, they are nonetheless deeply human. Taken together, the collection is about more than sobriety. It’s a celebration of the quotidian, a love letter to the beauty of the mundane.
Ann Hulbert
RaveThe Minneapolis Star TribuneThere are few secrets here for raising a genius, or for being one. That’s good news. Instead, Ann Hulbert...delivers something infinitely richer — a nuanced study of the lives of 15 child prodigies, as well as the parents and mentors who shaped them, and the theories that (tried to) explain them. Hulbert has chosen her wunderkinds carefully, recognizing them not only for their individual brilliance but also as pint-size portraits of their eras … While Hulbert valiantly offers an epilogue laced with lessons about the importance of patience and resilience and a strong sense of self, the richness of the book, and the pleasure of it, is in the human stories.
Kate DiCamillo
RaveMinneapolis Star TribuneIn another novel, all this could get oppressively sappy. But DiCamillo — who also grew up in central Florida and is herself a veteran of baton-twirling lessons — wryly captures the adventure and confusion of childhood with a gut-wrenching lack of sentimentality and a razor-sharp wit...[I]n spare, fantastically unfussy prose, the two-time Newbery Award winner creates a profoundly rich world where everyone, heroes and minor characters alike, is at once achingly human and brilliantly bizarre. There are no easy answers here — just a story of loss and friendship steeped in bittersweet hope.
