PanThe Observer (UK)... the best that can be said about Daum’s meandering tract is that its breezy, conversational tone goes down quick and easy. The worst that can be said is that it reads like a late-in-life coming-of-age story in which this \'straight, cis-gendered, able-bodied, (mostly) heterenormative white chick\' giggles whilst unloading politically incorrect knowledge-bombs on her New York peers ... It’s not as if I didn’t find myself nodding in agreement here or there...But Daum, despite her own confidence, never steps up and proves why the world so needed this book—rather than a simple list of hyperlinks to the more robust Salon and New Yorker articles that informed it ... is at its weakest when it gets personal ... Conveniently, her targets are all straw(wo)men and caricatures—loony Social Justice Warriors who wear I DRINK MALE TEARS t-shirts while slaying on Twitter ... certainly she is entitled to her opinions on sexism, racism and whatever else, it would just be nice if they were more enlightening; I swear I’ve heard more eye-opening takes on some of these issues on an episode of Law & Order: SVU ... Daum’s not an insightful guide, and her conversion story is a cliché that she’s mistaken for something singular. She calls this book an \'extended rumination,\' which is perhaps a fancy word for a self-righteous, 221-page Twitter thread. In which case: Unfollow.
Mark Doten
MixedBookforum\"... a bizarre chimera that cobbles together adventure story, torture porn, cautionary manifesto, sociopolitical satire, magazine interview, and metafiction ... Trump Sky Alpha succeeds more in the realm of the pre-, rather than the post-, apocalyptic ... Doten does his best to eke drama out of chapters that describe little more than someone sitting at a computer looking stuff up, which can at times reach comedic proportions ... This heavily researched and referential approach can deliver polymathic thrills; other passages read like gussied-up Wikipedia entries ... The best parts of Doten’s book evince his talent for perverse, imaginative flights of fancy—the twenty-first century as a horrifying cartoon ... Trump Sky Alpha... can seem straightforward and subdued, despite its experimental flourishes ... But Trump Sky Alpha’s momentum keeps getting stymied by digressions into hacker culture and noodling theories about how the rise of the internet paved the road to hell, some of which read like the world’s driest bumper stickers...\
Ariel Levy
PositiveBookforumWoe to anyone picking up this slim collection who, steered wrong by its title, expects suburban-book-club fodder or ecstatic, dance-like-no-one's-watching self-affirmation. Deb Olin Unferth's sophomore volume of stories is more a cauldron of simmering desperation than a sisterhood of traveling pants ... Unferth has always been a wild talent in search of an appropriate form...Wait Till You See Me Dance confirms that the short story (and, albeit less reliably, the very, very short story) is her best vessel ... Ultimately, it is the longer-form stories in Wait Till You See Me Dance that make the collection memorable. Unferth might sprawl and meander at novel length, and her microfiction can occasionally seem breezy or abrupt—but somewhere in the middle, this author finds her sweet spot, stoking emotional intensity over the course of a mere handful of pages.
