About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Claire Dederer
Rave The Washington Independent Review of Books \"Readers may chafe at the way in which the author seems to conflate their actions with the actions of monstrous men. Is she suggesting that we’re all a little monstrous? In fact, she is ... Monsters is an expansive and big-hearted work, part memoir, part cultural criticism, part paean to complexity and nuance, and a full embrace of the human experience. It’s a cry to respond to art not just with the analytical mind or the critic’s prim embrace, but with the full range of emotion, with the whole body, the complete biographical self. It is a refreshing book that is at times uncomfortable, even painful, but necessarily so. We cannot simply label the monsters, put them in cages, and excise them from our lives, because they are everywhere among us. They are us.\
Rachel Aviv
Rave The Washington Independent Book Review ... fascinating ... In crafting compassionate, probing portraits of people who have forged their own stories, Rachel Aviv has written an engrossing and important book that shows how managed care and the current state of mental-health treatment is working from a two-dimensional model that reduces patients to diagnoses and — in some cases — dooms them to \'careers\' in mental illness that they cannot escape. With Strangers to Ourselves, she reminds us that we are all more complex, more multi-dimensional, more fascinating and mysterious than any single diagnosis, and that the real stories of who we are are worth probing in depth.
Siri Hustvedt
Rave The Washington Independent Review of Books Siri Hustvedt’s insatiable curiosity and deep immersion in many disciplines — literature, philosophy, history, anthropology, art criticism, political theory, psychiatry, neuroscience, embryology, and epigenetics — shine through each of the 20 essays in her latest book ... Siri Hustvedt’s keen intellect is evident on every page of this stunning collection, proving herself an authority worthy of attention.
Rabih Alameddine
Positive The Washington Independent Review of Books It is these latter stories — Mina’s and the author’s — that overshadow the many refugee voices, often reducing their suffering to brief vignettes. With the exception of Sumaiya’s quest to get her family to safety while battling a fatal illness, the refugees’ stories fade into the background ... If Alameddine is to be faulted for anything, it for his overreach, his ambition to create a single novel that encompasses the refugee crisis, a range of LGBTQ+ experiences, and metafiction. His book is driven not by plot — which tends to become diffuse — but by a storm of passion and rage and powerlessness in the face of suffering. Those who patiently work through his many meticulously constructed layers will be rewarded with a contemplative reading experience.
YZ Chin
Positive The Washington Independent Review of Books ... engaging ... Author Chin is at her best when describing the immigrant experience, the layers of belonging, the complexity of diasporic communities. In contrast, the love story at the center of the novel — Edwina’s crumbling marriage to Marlin — is thinner and less compelling. Marlin is already gone when the book begins, and the flashbacks do not adequately flesh him out. Edwina’s own internal struggles about what she wants in life are more vividly drawn than her longings for the ghostlike Marlin. Her struggle over loving or leaving America feels much more visceral and central to her future ... Throughout the novel, Chin makes excellent use of tech and engineering terms as metaphors ... In the end, Edwina’s objections are disregarded, the issues she raised declared \'edge cases that are outside of the scope\' of the first release. In other words, she herself — and her perspective as an Asian female immigrant—is an edge case. But her voice from the edge — perceptive, funny, introspective, smart, wry, calling to us from the margins — is one worth listening to.
Melissa Febos
Rave The Washington Independent Review of Books In attempting to trace these conflicting narratives — and their lasting effects — in her own life, Febos has written here a work that is both an exposé and a corrective, a memoir and a polemic...she once again turns her keen intellect and unflinching honesty toward myriad personal stories that have wider implications for girls’ and women’s narratives. Neither self-indulgent nor guilty of navel-gazing, Febos writes about herself always in the service of her larger project: to dissect the long-term ramifications of the societal narratives forced upon girls and women ... a book that deserves to be savored, to be read more than once, to be given to all the people in your life — not just the girls and women — because we are all responsible for ensuring that every person be able to live by their own narrative.
Heather Lende
Positive The Washington Independent Review of Books Lende’s writing has a homespun, plainspoken quality; at certain moments, she writes like a grandmother telling a meandering tale through a series of slow-paced anecdotes and tangents that require patience from the reader ... But don’t let her artlessness fool you. She is well read and whip smart, and her undying optimism and faith in her fellow citizens offer a needed buoy in our current election climate. Her book is timely and relevant ... Politics matters, Lende reminds us, on every level — maybe, especially, the local — and we all need to do our part.
Leila Aboulela
Mixed The Washington Independent Review of Books ... weaves together elements of the traditional pilgrimage narrative with a realistic account of the challenges of contemporary life, creating a fascinating if not entirely successful amalgamation in which characters worry about cellphone service in one scene and are visited by a magical bird in the next ... This crescendo drags on for too long, however, nearly completely subsuming the interesting narratives of the women’s real lives that Aboulela has so carefully constructed. The symbolism of the visions is blatant and moralistic, and readers may well find themselves impatient to surface from this world and witness the women return from holiday utterly transformed — or at least somewhat changed ... While the narrative does lead where it promised — to Lady Evelyn’s grave — the bloated dream sequence permanently distances readers from the heart of the novel: the day-to-day lives and struggles of three dynamic women.
Deborah Levy
Positive Washington Independent Review of Books Reading like an extended meditative essay rather than a traditional memoir or autobiography, The Cost of Living is about retelling one’s story — and about continuing that story past its expected ending, which, for a woman, is the cliché of being married with children and living happily ever after ... At times, Levy leaves out as much as she tells us, coming across as someone who is not at peace with the tortuous course her life has taken. But how many of us are? As her subtitle tells us, this is a working autobiography, a work in progress. As she writes toward the end, Levy is not interested in \'the major female character that has always been written\' but rather in \'a major unwritten female character.\' And, here, Levy has taken the first steps to creating that character, leaving it to others to develop her more fully.