PositiveLos Angeles Review of Books... at its core, a comedy of manners that explores twinship as merely one element among many other thematic endeavors. The book is populated by a cast of eccentric characters impervious to their ridiculousness and delightful in the asides they cast on society, desire, and devotion. The sisters are just two of them, and though their twinship continues to be discussed lightheartedly, neither the sisters nor White are oriented toward the nuances of twinship. Perhaps this is his most astute representation of all, though.
Tarashea Nesbit
PositiveBookreporterThrough a delicate reimagining of the lives of these individuals, whose subjectivities have been erased by the annals of history, Nesbit reconstitutes the mythological tale of America’s earliest settlers, creating an affecting story that exposes the hypocrisy and violence of this renowned originary settlement ... Nesbit is less intent on building a compelling mystery than she is in lyrically exposing the hypocrisy of the Puritans’ superiority and their cruelty masquerading as justice ... In stilted and formal language, written in a somewhat successful emulation of the 17th-century vernacular, Nesbit richly renders these female characters’ subjectivities as they endure, and occasionally transgress, the stringent bounds of their society ... Nesbit vividly resuscitates the female experience of Plymouth --- reanimating voices lost in traditional historical accounts while simultaneously showing how these voices were questioned, critiqued, repudiated and ultimately silenced. But she doesn’t accept that they have been truly silenced. They are there if you look for them, in the whispers and traces left by the historical archive, waiting for a little bit of imagination to do its work.
