RaveLos Angeles Times\"Milkman is a deft and triumphant work of considerable intelligence and importance. It is a deeply feminist work, a compelling and significant look at how the regular life of a young woman is intimately used for personal and political gain. And it is told originally. The voice isn’t so much eccentric and odd as strong and unique and honest — yes, the narration is like none you’ve read. That alone is its triumph ... The other triumph of Milkman is our narrator’s presentation of the troubles of being a woman — not just in a violent society torn apart by what is essentially a form of war ... Middle Sister is a force. She is a modern heroine. She is blisteringly observant of some pretty necessary truths about the state of a woman’s life and attempt to find her own agency. So what that her internalized narration is unsettling and unfamiliar at first? The reader should treasure the invitation to follow along with her brilliant train of thought.\
Bill Cunningham
RaveLos Angeles TimesFashion Climbing is delightfully dishy, snarky, judgmental, harsh, kind, adoring and ridiculously straightforward ... He was an incomparable observer of the New York social scene ... the most wonderful part of Fashion Climbing for this reader wasn’t the divine and transformative writing about the clothes or the parties, it was reading about all of Cunningham’s personal heroes — all women ... it is hard not to be gobsmacked reading it ... Fashion Climbing is smart and pure, revealing of a person’s sense of truth, self, business, confidence and wonderment at the world.
Barbara Kingsolver
PositiveNewsday...thank God for Barbara Kingsolver, one of America’s hardiest novelists (The Poisonwood Bible, The Bean Trees, etc.), who has also stumbled upon the lost history of Treat. Kingsolver went into the archives and got her hands on Treat’s papers and correspondence with Darwin, emerging with Unsheltered, a gripping novel ... Kingsolver ably navigates the problematic white privilege of the family, which is refreshing to read in a contemporary novel about white middle-class issues.
Nell Zink
RaveThe Los Angeles TimesBravo to Zink for realizing the full comedic potential of America’s rather rapid move away from its nicotine addiction, particularly during a time when everything feels so at stake, so nerve wracked and so helplessly rigged. (This novel is effortlessly current, by the way, so on target that Trump’s campaign is mentioned.) Zink expertly demonstrates how addled, anxious and alone Americans are and how in need of a drag of something they are to calm the collective nerves ... Nicotine was so addictive it made me want to reach for a cigarette when I was done.
Claire-Louise Bennett
RaveThe New Republic\"Muddiness is not typically a positive description for a narrative, but this mud is sparkling, full of mica and minerals that glitter with color when the sun’s rays hit. It’s through this glistening mud that Bennett’s readers get to mudlark, mucking about in prose that is alternatively deliberate and crisp, surrealistic and unknowable, to find real gems of observation and language ... It is equally satisfying that Bennett stomps all over writing-dude-in-nature territory without having to set a foot off her main character’s property line.\
Max Porter
RaveThe Los Angeles TimesThis is not a book easy to explain, because grief is not an easy feeling to convey, which is partly why the experimental form works so well here. The three alternating perspectives, from Crow, to Dad, to the Boys act as a frenzied and mournful circling of the slippery-to-define grief ... This book is a sublime and painful conjuring of a family’s grief and the misfit creature with the power to both haunt and help them. It is a complex story, not simply-told or sparse: Nothing is missing. Let it be a call for more great books of this length to be recognized for what they are — whole. Extraordinary is a book with feathers.
