PositiveThe New York Times Book Review... gripping ... With the instinct of a hunter himself, Hammer tracks Lendrum’s nefarious career, structuring the story with elegant precision ... Hammer’s depiction of the father and son’s sabotage of the African black eagle conservation project is extremely moving ... The problem with a book that focuses on a man who uploads videos of himself to YouTube taunting an Egyptian cobra, or who is accused of turning up the heat on an incubator full of live eggs to destroy evidence, is that it is impossible to feel empathy for Lendrum. What emerges from a series of shady, fraudulent activities is the profile of a blackhearted con man, a Dirty John of the bird world ... Hammer acknowledges that Lendrum’s unappealing sense of entitlement likely derives from growing up white and privileged in colonial Rhodesia. He continually asserts that Lendrum is charming, \'personable and likable,\' but he never comes across that way. Following the inventory of awful deeds, the reader is left appalled.
Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewThere’s a dreamlike feel to these scenes, which don’t induce the stomach-churning trauma of watching a house and then an entire street annihilated on a television screen. When we come across a child with a mutilated ear, we connect with the horror but can’t fully feel it. More convincing are Joukhadar’s depictions of the anxiety and stress that bedevil the family as they become refugees ... Joukhadar’s confidence and joy in storytelling comes to life in the fantastical side of the novel ... What Joukhadar does beautifully is to connect, in a vivid and urgent way, Syria and the United States ... The Map of Salt and Stars is important and timely because it shows how interconnected two supposedly opposing worlds can be.
S. A. Chakraborty
PositiveThe New York Times Book Review...seems we are about to be plunged into a cultural mash-up of The Thousand and One Nights and any number of young adult novels with plucky female protagonists... Chakraborty doesn’t hold back on the Eastern glitz ...The City of Brass is standard, fast-paced fantasy fare ... Most enjoyable is the gusto with which everything is thrown into her story, from massacres to zombies to djinns ...while The City of Brass doesn’t blow away cultural notions of difference or reconfigure the male-female divide, it does exploit the genre’s penchant for inclusion ...reads like an invitation for readers from Baghdad to Fairbanks to meet across impossibly divergent worlds through the shared language and images of the fantastical.
