PositiveThe Oregonian... arresting ... The best of the lot feature Winslow’s slick, inventive plotting, and several familiar and seductive characters ... In a sweet reward for those who’ve been reading the guy since the dawn of time, Boone Daniels and his Pacific Beach surfing buddies from \'The Dawn Patrol\' return in \'Sunset\' ... Winslow has been relentlessly outspoken about those detention camps...Strickland is a vehicle for that frustration when he is inexplicably drawn to Luz Gonsalvez, an abandoned 6-year-old in the Clint cages, and tries to locate her Salvadoran mother. But 60 pages, the basic ration in \'Broken,\' isn’t nearly enough to detail the emotional journey of this conservative cowboy, or the apathy and malevolence of those who stand between that 6-year-old and one last, glorious reunion.
Alice Hoffman
RaveThe Portland OregonianThe Red Garden is a collection of 14 stories that unfold, over the course of three centuries, in a Berkshire County town famous for its eels, the dogs and bears who are forever altering the course of human destiny, and its blood-red soil ...stories are populated by the generations of Motts, Patridges, Starrs and Jacobs who mix and marry in the shadow of Hightop Mountain. But they are animated by Hoffman's ongoing fascination with fairy tales... The great consolation, and inspiration, in reading Hoffman is recognizing that we all carry such stories, some almost as good as hers; we just don't tell them with the same attention to detail, the same eye toward forgiveness, the same balance of recklessness and restraint.
Colson Whitehead
PositiveThe Portland OregonianConvinced that plot, profits and parody can still be bled from the living dead, Whitehead gives us Zone One, where Mark Spitz and the rest of Omega Unit are pitted against Manhattan's zombie hordes ...Whitehead, a New Yorker with four other novels in the bag, isn't taking flesh-eating all that seriously. Even his protagonist's moniker, 'Mark Spitz,' is a punchline, albeit one that –– like so much of Zone One –– isn't quite as clever as the novelist thinks it is ... What we don't get in Zone One, unfortunately, is a lifesaving transfusion of story or suspense ... Is that Whitehead's homage to Cormac McCarthy? A swipe at his Pulitzer Prize? Or one last reminder that Whitehead can't breathe new life into a rotting genre?
Stephen King
MixedThe Portland OregonianTo the list of failures, add Full Dark, No Stars, another novella quartet that is, with one lone exception, startlingly unpleasant ... That exception is 'Big Driver,' in which Tess, a mystery writer in considerable demand on the book club circuit... King's other three novellas suffer in the talkative TomTom's absence ... However, King adds, he has believed from the very start that 'the best fiction was both propulsive and assaultive. It gets in your face. I have no quarrel with literary fiction ... (but) I want to provoke an emotional, even visceral, reaction in my readers.' Mission accomplished, boss.
