MixedThe New York Times Book ReviewOriginal Prin Randy Boyagoda’s third novel, is an original animal, a comedy of literary and cultural references, with wordplay involving unfunny matters like cancer, a crisis of faith and Islamic terrorism, as well as easier comedic subjects like juice-box fatherhood and academic power plays ... Boyagoda finds dark absurdities in all corners ... There are references throughout to those who were likely Boyagoda’s influences ... Most of this is clever, often ingenious, but the frequency of one-liners works against the novel’s trajectory. The comedic exit ramps feel like authorial escapes, as if we can’t go more than a page or two before the next absurdity, and so we’re less involved in Prin’s journey, and more aware of Boyagoda’s restless intellect ... Prin evolves in surprising ways, and tensions spike. For readers feeling confounded at the end, fear not. It’s the first in a planned trilogy.
Jonathan Safran Foer
MixedThe San Francisco ChronicleThe boy's hobbies and interests are imaginative and colorfully described. But they have the effect of making us think Oskar is either older, or else an unreasonable invention. Nine he is not … What seem authentically 9 are Oskar's fears of things like suspension bridges, germs and fireworks, and his conversations much later in the book, along with some refreshingly unadorned observations … Foer might have done better to move sooner from the merely comic – it gives the illusion that he's rising above sentimentality when the opposite is true. What's needed is New York, and a believable child, a family in ruins, finding strength.
David Mitchell
PositiveThe San Francisco ChronicleCloud Atlas is a remarkable achievement, a frightening, beautiful, funny, wildly inventive, elaborately conceived tour de force. It places us not in one intensely imagined world but six: six different time periods, milieus, vocabularies and literary styles … To read Cloud Atlas is to feel perpetually off balance, often disoriented, occasionally repulsed. But the rewards outweigh the struggle, and in the end, Mitchell offers his readers enormous and surprising satisfactions … Throughout the book Mitchell's characters make comments about the stories that precede them, and at times speak directly to the book as a whole … One senses that for all the work Mitchell has done on the page he's done far more off the page, investing his characters with elaborate histories that he can recite by memory forward and back.
