RaveThe RumpusEach of the twelve stories is unlike any I have read before: masterfully constructed, deftly written, and strange in only the ways that count ... Cook is committed to the uncanny. The worlds of her stories are like our own but unnerving and different, somehow menacing. The strength of each story’s conceit lies in the author’s awareness of our deepest fears and, therefore, desires—the possibilities that frighten and electrify and consume and terrorize and animate us all at once. In that way, Cook has written a collection of ambivalence: Man V. Nature oscillates rapidly between divergent poles of familiarity and strangeness, likeness and difference, comfort and horror, love and hatred. Her stories live in the twilit nether of the neither/nor ... Through it all, a basso continuo rumbles the domestic scaffold around which each tale wraps itself. The tension between social structure and primal desire seems to always approach a breaking point, a level of unsustainability that might explode the book’s binding and singe the hair on the backs of the reader’s fingers ... Cook’s fiction is moving in a way that testifies to her deep familiarity with the human experience.
David Mitchell
PanThe RumpusMaybe three-quarters of this sizeable text is well written and captivating. Holly Sykes, a sort of main character who narrates the first section, is headstrong, honest, and utterly likeable. Following an argument with her mother, she runs away from home and right into a battle that makes approximately zero sense to the reader. Mitchell’s prose is often so deft and appropriate that one has to wonder why he would spoil it with garbled, rambling accusations, unfamiliar names, and capitalized words … Mitchell’s strength lies in chronicling the experiences of people—humans—who live and die and love in between. His insistence on threading an ungainly carpet of half-digital, half-mystical magic is puzzling, especially when it is so unnecessarily complex.
Haruki Murakami
MixedThe Millions...Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage is considerably flawed, even when judged within the strange and disjointed context of the author’s previous work ... There is something relentlessly compelling about following a sympathetic character on a journey to find the missing pieces to the jigsaw puzzle du jour, whether those pieces are lost relatives, unuttered truths, or, I don’t know, horcruxes ... All of the hallmarks of Murakami’s style... all are present in Colorless Tsukuru, but for perhaps the first time in his work, they seem flat and uninteresting, almost overused, as if the novel is a parody of his earlier work ... It is hard to sympathize with a character like Tsukuru, who seems to have arisen out of a writing prompt that challenges the writer to create someone with no personality at all ...is aloof, quiet, and finally, dissonant.
