RaveThe Women\'s Review of BooksWith her fierce, poetic new novel, I Love You but I’ve Chosen Darkness, Watkins has accomplished her artistic task: she panders to no one ... Watkins is one of our greatest writers of place. Her descriptions of the West are stunning and unsentimental .
Alix Ohlin
PositiveThe Women\'s Review of BooksIn Ohlin’s collection, fiction meanders like life does, and the reader is carried along in the current ... Her prose is clean and unadorned with poetic flourish. She maintains a narrative distance from her characters even in first person, and I felt not immersed in the stories but as though I were watching through a window as other people’s lives unfolded ... In several stories, Ohlin introduces characters who seem to be coded as Black, yet Ohlin dances around the issue of race, as though too shy to mention it. The reader is left to parse out stereotypical signifiers of race ... Writing about race in fiction is complicated and fraught, especially for a white author, but this approach does not seem to be the solution ... The collection is best when it turns its attention to the great sweep of human life, how our years are filled with unexpected success or failure, how people reveal or hide themselves.
Nana Nkweti
RaveThe Women\'s Review of Books... a vivacious collection with sentences that sizzle on the page ...a unique new voice from the first page ... Cameroonian and Black American culture are the fabric from which the stories in this collection are crafted, with anthropological details woven through like sparkling tinsel ... Nkweti’s stories challenge the pathological, dark-continent image that is still far too prevalent in the American media’s representation of African nations, and even those of us who know to critique such a simplistic view still find ourselves internalizing it. The Cameroon of Cowrie Shells—motherland, diaspora—is a lush, complex setting that expands the map of the reader’s known world ... Some of pieces in this collection felt more like character studies than fully developed stories. At times I yearned for a more traditional narrative arc instead of mere glimpses into other lives. One can argue that this is how life is, that other people pass in and out of our spheres without necessarily completing an arc; we see degrees, not the full radius. But fiction—fiction about mermaids and zombies, no less—need not be tethered by reality...Still, Nkweti’s prose is electric enough to overcome any shortcomings the collection may have ... Nkweti’s book is sharp and gorgeous, and we too are left pleasurably stung.
Raven Leilani
RaveThe Women\'s Review of BooksWe have all spent months locked away, desperate for human contact, and here is a book that lets us so intimately into other people’s lives and marriages. Leilani knows the joy of fiction comes from voyeurism, and she lets the reader indulge ... a masterpiece for anyone who has ever been horny on main ... Edie is brilliant, sensitive, and sharply funny. Her jokes land. She assesses herself with a blistering objectivity ... Leilani’s prose cuts out collage pieces with the precision of an exacto knife ... The fiction writer’s greatest trick is to reveal to the reader a truth they didn’t realize they already knew. The reader feels smarter for witnessing this reveal, and Leilani manages this again and again with an expert sleight of hand ... Leilani understands that a book cannot humanize people—they are already human. Edie is a compelling character precisely because Leilani rejects the idea that fiction must create empathy through positive representation, a concept that turns marginalized people on the page into respectability tokens. Edie is never corralled into the role of the Strong Female Character. She has selfish thoughts and irritable bowels. She errs the way white characters, especially men, have always been allowed to err—she has a series of workplace affairs, for example, which she details in a delightful catalog of body parts and office equipment, confessing that this has been the best part of the job. Edie knows her humanity as intrinsically as a bird knows it is a bird, and this insistence, at odds with the world that denies it, is the tension that drives every page of Luster ... Leilani deconstructs with a trained artist’s eye. Like DaVinci, she is sneaking into the graveyard at night to peel away the skin of humanity and understand what lies beneath ... White literary culture has long denied Black women orbit; into this void now arrives Raven Leilani, and a new star ignites.
