RaveThe New RepublicCooke manages to pull off the rare feat of profiling women writers without rendering their lives tragic tales of suppressed ambition, perpetual struggles against the limitations imposed on their sex, or exemplary narratives of triumphing over expectations ... She presents them not as a blueprint but as a kind of permission, above all, to evolve: to move through many iterations of oneself and of womanhood ... In Cooke’s book I find a rare kind of permission: it’s OK to be all the things at once, messy and jumbled; or maybe one thing for two years here, or five years there, or even several decades, and then something else entirely ... Mutability is unsettling. But the uncertainty and friction created by mutability is what makes great art.
Anya Kamenetz
MixedThe New York Times Book Review... a relentless account of ruptures in so many Americans’ lives, from mental health crises to hunger to academic failures and accidents ... Kamenetz’s reach and aim as a reporter are admirable ... She elegantly incorporates studies and data. Her prose is tight, smooth and swift. The Stolen Year, however, reads more like a catalog of events than a probing, multidimensional narrative ... This stems from the way the book is structured: as a series of sections no more than a few pages long, and many much shorter, grouped loosely by subject. Many of these sections slightly conflict with one another and gesture toward different conclusions and arguments ... The effect on the reader of these discrete fragmentary bursts is of staring down at a plot of scattered fossils, trying to figure out what beast they represent ... In order for complications and contradictions to deepen a narrative rather than splinter it, they need to be woven together with incisive, sustained analysis. The Stolen Year, however, never burrows too deeply into any of the questions it poses ... Part of the reason these questions go unanswered lies in the book’s adherence to accepted and comfortable narratives ... a 339-page book about the devastating impacts of the pandemic on children — mental illness, academic setbacks, fractured family relationships — that does not engage deeply with the causes of school closure can start to seem like an act of magical thinking ... Kamenetz often relies on verbal contortions that obscure any clear actors ... gives us all the known characters playing all the same parts...My criticism is not that these characterizations don’t ring true to me, but that they are givens enacted with such fidelity that they render the world static ... While reported and written with empathy, care and skill, The Stolen Year ultimately did not reveal to me any new dimension of what I’d lived. What I found most interesting were the snippets of Kamenetz’s work that suggested more provocative and untold narratives.
