MixedAssociated PressThe way these birds journey together and build upon one another’s human counterparts is where the novel’s authenticity and beauty lie ... Gil’s insightful rumination bring the writing its life and the characters their development ... While Millet shines light on the timely theme of taking responsibility for the world we’ve inherited is vital, these larger questions the novel hints at — the infinite, love’s intangibility, the stains of evil — leave readers hanging as she wrangles them into simplistic, flat turns of events. The anticlimactic slice-of-life frame of Gil’s character never quite substantiates the sweeping, all-encompassing conjecture at which he gradually arrives. Sparse writing creates mystery but also hinders the possible intricacies of the outcome. For all the novel’s transcendence through the past’s burdens and the goodness of small acts, its convictions don’t go far enough.
Elizabeth Strout
RaveAssociated PressThe broader social context of doom and despair contrasts with the close and compassionate first-person narrator and reflects the novel’s primary interests in loss and love on a systemic and personal level. The novel inhabits an emotionally rich terrain ... Strout’s prose is truthful and emphatic. At times lyrical, at moments burdened, the layered texture to Strout’s tone fights a hint of self-doubt with patience and kindness ... Her descriptions are vivid and unique ... It is not essential to being immersed in Strout’s writing, which lives in the moment. Someone familiar with Strout’s previous novels would surely connect to this one on a deeper level.
Fernanda Melchor, trans. by Sophie Hughes
RaveAssociated PressMacabre characters drive the plot and slithering syntax the prose, guiding Melchor’s tale into the shadows of a society locked by chains ... Between the basic instincts and curdled socialization that boil the plot, the story’s thrill only grows in catastrophic momentum ... Melchor’s prose undulates with shifting clauses and semantic chaos ... Melchor has added a necessary work to the gothic genre resonant with the social fragilities of today\'s Mexico, the geopolitical vulnerability it speaks to defiant of aesthetic pretensions and moralistic conclusions. Amidst the black river that flows out in the margins of the sea, the relations between characters who populate the world\'s parasitic tendencies, and the cavernous fate to which the protagonists are brought, there is no redemption in this paradise lost.
Ocean Vuong
RaveThe Associated PressVuong orbits the contours of grief, embedding them into clausal configurations and juxtaposed tones. These structures are reflected in Vuong’s themes of time and place, parent and child, nation and individual, and strength and weakness as he unfolds the logic of loss ... Retrogression, lists and notes structure some of Vuong’s words, but the poet’s linguistic ferocity illuminates his mother’s spirit from the rays of memory.
Thomas Halliday
RaveAssociated PressDensely detailed ... Vivid ... In between the intriguing characters residing in the ethereal mountain glens and mysterious oceans are the bold hypotheses that lead readers to reimagine the dynamics of coexistence ... An intricate analysis of our planet’s interconnected past, it is impossible to come away from Otherlands without awe for what may lie ahead.
Sheila Heti
PositiveThe Associated PressThe novel’s little action conveys the solipsism of modern friendship, the intangibility of romance, the pretensions of the mind and twisted filial love. Thought exercises take over plot ... Digressions in setting and tone structure the journey’s nine parts. These shifts lend the work a quality of a ruminative diary entry that rambles with little direction ... While representative of Heti’s candor, they represent her quest into the ephemeral roots of meaning ... What pulls Heti’s writing together is observation for bodies and binaries ... The blunt grace of these sentences capture the essence of Heti’s novel as a light into the cliffhangers into the void.
Amanda Gorman
RaveThe Associated PressAlliterative insights and free-versed inquiry catalyze Gorman’s performative poetics on the page. Her third publication, Gorman’s scholarly sensibility illuminates her quest for social reparations and cultural history, unpacking their terrains through revisionism and erasure that imagine alternative renderings of past narratives ... Gorman analyzes the amalgamation of microbial, social and environmental catastrophe that conjoined during the past two years. She projects them beyond the current moment, conceiving of their ties as the liminal space of our progress ... Ultimately, these poems reflect the abstractions of knowledge, memory, forgiveness and communion that forge our nation ... Gorman’s commitment to our precarious moment accounts for their tone as found objects. At times they are ruminative relics that risk repetition, but it is thanks to Gorman’s linguistic versatility that keeps the reader along: Unearthing strains of syntax as they pertain to the American psyche or deconstructing a word’s varying context ... At her best, Gorman stewards this intimate moment of change with visual viscera ... Embodying the idiosyncrasies of renewal, Gorman carves out the imperfect instinct towards hope ... Between breath, light, water and soil, text messages and letters, and visual formations of ships, whales and flags, Gorman’s Call Us What We Carry is an inventive literary resurrection.
