RaveChicago Review of BooksNarrated in the second person, the \'you\' of the novel embodies a self that is at once a detached observer and a self-reflexive voice shaping the narrator’s own story ... The gaze—that fleeting instant of exchange—weaves a significant undercurrent of belonging and alienation in the novel ... sophisticated and unapologetic in its telling of a relationship between a Black man and a Black woman who come to see each other in rare, uninhibited intimacy interrupted by the constant, ambient violence of microaggressions and police brutality ... Nelson’s voice is wholly contemporary and original, shifting between essayistic modes that weave Saidiya Hartman, Teju Cole, and Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight into the plot of the novel, adding to the chorus the likes of Dizzee Rascal and Kendrick Lamar to create a thunderous interdisciplinary lineage of uncompromising Black joy ... Through motif and repetition, Nelson creates a resonant aural narrative that is by turns lively and heartbreaking ... ultimately a novel that shows us how to move beyond a life of survival into a life that is lived—where one can be seen for who they are, even and especially when the personal is the political. It is a rare novel: a slow burner that is also a page-turner, reminding us that the erotic has always been about a richness of life.
Doireann Ní Ghríofa
PositiveThe Chicago Review of BooksNí Ghríofa’s approach focuses on the body, and in doing so breaks the traditional binary of choice between a life of art or a life of family ... a kaleidoscopic book of \'homemaking\' that centers the intuitive knowledge of the body in order to learn to live—again, again, and again.
Fariha Róisín
RaveThe Chicago Review of Books... a timely epic of female friendship ... Róisín’s writing twinkles with humour and ways of being that are wholly contemporary, endearing us to Taylia ... Although the novel clocks in at almost three-hundred pages, the weave between the past and the present keeps the story alive right to the end ... a vivid account of the way memory can nurture reinvention. Taylia’s journey towards healing and self-acceptance finds timely thematic resonances, such as those in British writer-director Michaela Coel’s HBO series, I May Destroy You, and Leila Slimane’s novel, Adele, which centre female desire and reclamation. Like these, Like a Bird is a tour de force for women of colour and survivors of sexual assault.
Olga Tokarczuk, Trans. by Jennifer Croft
RaveChicago Review of BooksWith keen observation and wit, Flights takes us from airports around the world where academics give mini lectures to museums that house \'freaks\' of nature ... Flights follows an associative logic akin to poetry, employing images and patterns to thread together different characters and situations, despite shifts in time and place ... Because of these patterns, Flights is a novel that teaches us how to read it while we are reading it ... By absorbing and refracting genres such as theory and autobiography through the structure of the scene and the situation itself, Tokarczuk achieves integrity to the process of storytelling and travelling. These fragments seamlessly shift from first-person narration to third-person points of view ... Flights coheres because of the voice of its narrator: an unassuming, humorous, and curious voice, ever willing to change and bring the world into its own palimpsest of worlds.
