PositiveThe Chicago ReaderIt may seem ridiculous to harp on a book cover, but this is a cover that says, \'This is a book for women.\' Fuller would not have approved ... With the aid of Fuller\'s voluminous correspondence, Marshall recreates a young woman who feels achingly contemporary ... Marshall\'s a wonderful writer, and her book is a good place to start.
Deborah Shapiro
PositiveThe Chicago ReaderThe parts of The Sun in Your Eyes that linger most in my mind are the settings and moods that Shapiro creates: the golden, hazy college summer when Lee and Viv become friends ... It's difficult to evoke nostalgia without becoming maudlin or sentimental, but Shapiro pulls it off, enough to justify the bond that holds Viv and Lee so tightly.
Jessi Klein
PanThe Chicago Reader...as she does in the 'tom man' essay and almost every other piece in the book, Klein ends a few sentences after arriving at the main point, leaving me with no answers to all the questions she just raised, only a new way to identify myself ... It's like the beginning of a beautiful all-day Gchat conversation. On a sentence level, her writing is hilarious and smart, sometimes even brilliant. But the underlying feature of the book as a whole is laziness, as though Klein squeezed in writing the chapters between her many other responsibilities.
Kate Bolick
PanThe Chicago ReaderSpinster is less about the basic necessity of marriage and more about the search for personal fulfillment and about how that's possible for a single, childless woman. The problem is that Bolick's exploration of the issue is simultaneously too general—because it attempts to address all women—and too specific—because it uses the lens of Bolick's experience and the experiences of five woman writers she admires—to be very satisfying. The whole book reads like a 300-page article in a glossy women's magazine, a jumble of research, helpful statistics, mini biographies of spinsters of the past, filled out with a great deal of—probably too much—detail about Bolick's own dating history and the evolution of her personal philosophy of spinsterdom.
Sarah Hepola
RaveThe Chicago ReaderHepola's not asking for anyone's pity. She's just written as good an explanation as I've ever read of why some people willingly hurt themselves so badly and why they just can't stop.
