RaveLos Angeles Times... brilliant and sly ... Inkbourne is the village, and Fuller shrewdly deconstructs romantic notions about places like this, revealing a scene closer to Gothic horror ... Julius finds them a dilapidated trailer deep in the spinney. Some of Fuller’s best writing limns the history in these chalk ridges and forests ... Fuller’s cottage stayed in my dreams, the wood range glowing.
Joan Silber
RaveThe Los Angeles Times... classic Joan Silber ... Silber’s effortless dissemination of facts in narrative is always impressive because her characters are so engaging and believable. Ethan, a diehard romantic but also a lawyer, has a great wry voice in dialogue with Abby, who teaches middle-school English in the Bronx and begins to travel the world alone ... The tender care provided by Ethan for Saul and the memories of all the men lost to AIDS were for me the pulsing heart of the book.
Margaret Atwood
RaveLos Angeles TimesMargaret Atwood’s powers are on full display ... Atwood’s new novel is all about narrative, the written and recorded testimonies of three women ... Illicit sex, of course, in this republic founded on sexual control, leads to the complicated, fascinating plot of The Testaments ... Atwood’s braided storyline leads to the best parts of the novel, the conversations between girls and women ... Everyone should read The Testaments and consider the true desires of human nature.
Marlon James
PositiveLos Angeles TimesThe Book of Night Women is not merely a historical novel. It is a book as heavily peopled and dark as the night in this isolated and brutal place. It is a canticle of love and hate ... The lasting inheritances of slavery cannot be forgotten, and through novels such as this one, history is felt. There are crowds of characters, many subplots, and a lot of history and geography to keep track of. That is how life on a huge plantation would have been. The novel can be unrelentingly violent, and the litany of terror, torture and revenge is long and horrifically detailed.
Akwaeke Emezi
RaveThe Los Angeles Times\"The novel is based in many of the realities of the writer\'s life, but the prose is infused with imaginative lyricism and tone. In the end, this coming-of-age novel also has one foot on the other side, held between the open gates — a young woman of many nations and many souls. The journey undertaken in the novel is swirling and vivid, vicious and painful, and rendered by Emezi in shards as sharp and glittering as those with which Ada cuts her forearms and thighs, in blood offering to Asughara ... Emezi’s lyrical writing, her alliterative and symmetrical prose, explores the deep questions of otherness, of a single heart and soul hovering between, the gates open, fighting for peace.\
RaveThe Los Angeles TimesDíaz's novel is a hell of a book. It doesn't care about categories. It's densely populated; it's obsessed with language. It's Dominican and American, not about immigration but diaspora, in which one family's dramas are entwined with a nation's, not about history as information but as dark-force destroyer … [Yunior’s] dazzling wordplay is impressive. But by the end, it is his tenderness and loyalty and melancholy that breaks the heart. That is wondrous in itself. It takes novelistic audacity for Díaz to make his narrator at first anonymous, unconcerned about whether his language is accessible, flawed and angry at his upbringing.
Helen Macdonald
RaveThe Los Angeles TimesIn this singular book that combines memoir and landscape, history and falconry, Macdonald robs from her anger by choosing to train and live with a robber bird, and in doing so, she becomes wild....That is what Macdonald tells us so eloquently in her fine memoir — that transformation of our docile or resigned lives can be had if we only look up into the world.
