About Book Marks
Sarah Seltzer Sarah Seltzer is a journalist and writer specializing in gender, activism, and popular culture. She is the Deputy Editor of Flavorwire. Sarah’s work has appeared in venues such as the Washington Post, Publishers Weekly, the Los Angeles Times, Ms. Magazine, The Jewish Daily Forward, and NPR, and on the websites of The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor, Salon, The Nation, AlterNet, the Women’s Media Center, The Wall Street Journal, Jezebel, The Daily Beast, and Mother Jones. She can be found on Twitter @sarahmseltzer
Recent Reviews
Ann Patchett
Positive Flavorwire Patchett has done something slightly different, reverse-engineering the family novel into something more diffuse and modern, something that speaks to the breakdown of traditional arcs and structures ... Commonwealth’s best sections remain its crowd scenes; with lively moments and multiple players jockeying for attention ... So many of the novels you read have a sense of fatalism, a destined arc. In a sense, the work of this novel is to undo that fatalistic aspect of the narratives we create about our families and their histories.
Joan London
Rave Flavorwire The Golden Age is the rare novel that makes its reader want to cry at almost every single page, but manages to be uplifting at the same time ... The novel’s passages about both the war and the disease are spare but no less brutal for that, leaving the imagination to do the hard work of understanding just what the characters have endured.
J.K. Rowling, Jack Thorne & John Tiffany
Positive Flavorwire Thankfully, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child has added a much-needed coda that reminds us of the original seven book-series’ complex folds and wrinkles. In short: this script’s existence makes the Harry Potter series better ... The action, which picks up where the epilogue leaves off, bears Rowling’s best storytelling hallmarks: breathless, well-choreographed adventure setpieces, along with chemistry between the original characters ... The script’s dialogue is fine, although it lacks Rowling’s particular talent for precise verbal humor.
Kate Bolick
Mixed Flavorwire Bolick never really explains exactly what about the social institution of marriage threatens to stifle her, instead showing us again and again (until the overall effect is near-stultifying) how she bolted each time she got close to being betrothed ... Bolick’s unique journey underscores the need for all of us to take our own journeys, whether they stop off at the altar or not. It’s a worthy feat of inspiration.
Jon Krakauer
Positive Flavorwire Though it paints a picture, Missoula is less painterly than the author’s gorgeous series of mountaineering books, less chilling than his explorations into cover-ups and crimes in the fundamentalist Mormon community. It’s more of a detailed pencil sketch. He doesn’t stray across centuries and geographies, remaining almost claustrophobically clinical and local. There are a few sections that feel like Rape 101 — this is, after all, writing for a general audience ... Krakauer isn’t speaking to 'us.' He’s speaking to his mainstream audience, and many of them are probably as ignorant as he admits he was. By some standards, that’s called being an ally. But by any standards, it’s being a good writer.
Sunil Yapa
Pan Flavorwire What’s so remarkable about this novel is that even in the midst of navigating two levels of drama — interpersonal and situational — Yapa also keeps his pen trained on the moral issue at stake.