About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Amanda Peters
Positive The Boston Globe Peters, a writer of Mi’kmaw descent, presents the Mi’kmaq as struggling to hold on to the things that make them Indian while surrounded by a culture that wants to erase them. But in telling the story from the point-of-view of two Indians...she recenters the narrative ... A haunting novel, unfurling slowly and far too casually, a nightmare told over a cup of tea. A little research reveals the horrific truths underlying Peters’s story: Native children in both the US and Canada were kidnapped and stolen at alarming rates for a long time, raised in cultures just footsteps from their own, without a clue about their true origins.
Selby Wynn Schwartz
Positive Boston Globe To call After Sappho a novel is to push the definition of “a novel” right to the window without technically going completely outside. That being said, the novel as we know it could probably use a partial defenestration. After Sappho is unpredictable in form and mercurial in its structure — it has no real plot or chronology, other than to follow the lives of a select group of mostly (white and) incredibly privileged women around Western Europe during a time of great upheaval around women’s rights. But it remains enthralling.
Jonathan Escoffery
Positive Boston Globe Captivating ... While If I Survive You has a great sense of humor, it reflects little of the joy and pleasure that also define Miami — the food and music and dancing and art and flirtation that make life in the Magic City so thrilling and worthwhile ... Where Escoffery does reflect joy is in the book’s composition. Escoffery’s sentences push boundaries and create a symphony of language — breaking the rules of writing while showing his mastery of them. Each chapter takes on a different style, and readers may sense they were witnessing the emergence of a master stylist ... Still, while “f I Survive You dissects masculinity beautifully, it relegates its women to side characters ... Escoffery doesn’t let his characters off the hook, though ... If I Survive You is a lovely and complicated portrait of masculinity in one Jamaican-American family. Escoffery writes with great care and empathy for his main characters, and in doing so he reveals the richness of feeling that comes with the desire to run away.
Sidik Fofana
Rave Boston Globe Fofana’s debut is impressive — his characters exude life and the different voices stay with the reader long after the book has been shelved ... Fofana’s characters are brutally human, and sometimes I worry for them, as I worry for the very real people who are facing the realities of rising rent, stagnant incomes, and impossible-to-attain mortgages ... does not shy away from complexity. The people in these stories are inconsistent, the way actual people are inconsistent, justifying their own mistakes and petty retaliations to themselves. I found myself wanting to argue with the characters, a sign of how real they became to me. Like real living people, everyone here exists in the gray of morality, ethics, and lawfulness ... While the tenants of Banneker haven’t faced the current post-Obama world, their struggles still feel relevant. The ups and downs of the economy and the pandemic have forced a lot of people to reexamine their lives. Many folks have had to move home, many have had to downgrade, and many are worrying about what will finally push them into crime or welfare ... Sidik Fofana captures eight unique voices in eight unique predicaments. There is no one story of gentrification, there are individual people with individual struggles. Stories brings those people, and their very real hustles and struggles, to life ... Still — Fofana’s characters are better than most of us at getting back up again.
Kali Fajardo-Anstine
Rave The Boston Globe Fajardo-Anstine deftly weaves in chronicles of Colorado and the American West throughout, allowing Luz’s ancestors to bear witness to the forces of Westward Expansion, political corruption, and poverty-driven migration ... a Western novel—it cares deeply about the landscape. The terrain of the Lost Territory teems with life, even as settling pioneers call it empty. The cold mountains and expansive plains of Colorado serve as stand-ins for the harsh realities Luz endures. No land can be truly conquered. No people can be truly conquered either. Not as long as their stories, and their memories, endure ... Grief and loss are centered in the novel, but even in these moments of grief it is possible to find joy. Luz and her family find happiness in food, long conversations, and spontaneous picnics, the little celebrations that give life its meaning. Luz — Little Light that she is — like so many women in her family, holds onto hope in the face of unspeakable pain. She doesn’t have to see clearly to know that good things will come too.
Denis Johnson
Rave The Los Angeles Times Johnson\'s new narrators have unreliable bodies (with unreliable digestive tracts), unreliable memories, unreliable spouses and unreliable friends. Even death is unreliable, as poorly timed as it is inevitable ... Time doesn\'t exist — stories move forward and back through entire lifetimes — yet, the theme of lost time echoes heavily throughout the book ... The stories aren\'t moralizing; Johnson is creating raw portraits of deeply flawed men ... Yet even when his stories are problematic, Johnson\'s sentences carry great weight and beauty. The poet\'s ear is still there, sharp and poignant as ever ... Johnson\'s posthumous collection reflects his sensibilities but with a struggle to make sense of life. There\'s no more time to waste in meaningless bars, having meaningless conversations, yet in some ways, there was no time to waste doing anything else.