PositiveLos Angeles Review of BooksPercy’s stories tend largely toward domestic realism with a generous dosage of bleakness and violence ... his tales have become deeply Gothic, too ... Suicide Woods is Percy at his most joyful and carefree; he seems to be having a great deal of fun ... It’s always lots of fun to read, if not across the board successful—like rooting through a trick-or-treat bag, searching for the choicest bites ... we see the denizens of these stories, too, grasping after a humanity they can never achieve—or one that was never available to them in the first place. Suicide Woods leads us through a gleefully nightmarish gallery of our worst existential fears.
Mesha Maren
RaveLos Angeles Review of Books\"Mesha Maren\'s Sugar Run is a novel as unlikely as it is brutal. For all the desperate ex-cons, pill-popping moms, and backwoods human traffickers who populate its pages, it’s almost alarming to find, at the edges, glimmers of pastoral beauty ... The effect of encountering such passages—and there are many—in a novel as hard-charging as Sugar Run is like hearing birdcall in the wake of a gruesome shootout, or finding a swallowed heist diamond glinting in the sawed-open guts of a cadaver. It comes so unexpected—a weird, tender gift. We barely recognize it for the mercy it grants us ... a hard-bitten, lyrical country noir ... a novel that embraces its literary heritage head-on, sometimes conforming and sometimes subverting, and it manages in the process to produce something entirely poignant and new. As a country noir, though, it nails all the beats ... Sugar Run’s ending approaches transcendent; Maren really sticks the landing ... Sugar Run’s flashes of pastoral beauty amid so much violence and ruin translate at the end of the novel into a kind of grace for Jodi less theistic than [Flannery] O’Connor’s, but just as profound in its implications.
Kate Atkinson
MixedThe Los Angeles Review of BooksIf all of this plot-work sounds over-determined, that’s because it is. The time-shifts in Transcription, while not necessarily confusing, tend instead to be uprooting, dismantling the reader’s interest just when things are getting good, not to mention the fact that, cumulatively, they stand as a glaring monument to authorial intrusion in a plot that would seem to tell itself ... the strenuousness of the book’s storytelling starts to lean its full weight on what’s already happened and nearly crushes what’s to come. For the reader and for Atkinson, it almost feels like giving up ... Even so, nearly the entire first half of Transcription, with Juliet firmly embedded in the 1940 timeline for over a hundred pages, is engrossing and well orchestrated indeed. This is mostly a credit to Juliet’s understated expansiveness as a character ... Atkinson’s many expert depictions of fascism-in-the-offing are some the novel’s most disconcerting pleasures ... That distinctly British wryness, on full display throughout Transcription, is one of Atkinson’s strongest suits as a writer; all the same, it can get in her way ... two of Atkinson’s most irritating quirks in the novel: Juliet’s third-person limited close POV ... And then there’s those parenthetical reaction shots, ubiquitous throughout the novel, that clutter and over-stretch Atkinson’s syntax ... And so, sadly, after a taut and finely calibrated first half, Transcription’s second movement stumbles and falls ... The last third of Transcription, riddled with busy plotting and dramatic implausibility, banks on incoherence.
