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Recent Reviews
Meg Wolitzer
Rave The Boston Globe \"...[an] exuberant, sprawling novel, which may be Wolitzer’s most ambitious yet ... Some of the best scenes in this book are from Cory’s or Zee’s perspectives, as Wolitzer follows them through college and into their 20s, where their stories gain a thrilling — if also heartbreaking — momentum ... Wolitzer is known as a seriously funny chronicler of both the minutiae and sweep of modern American life, capable of storytelling as moving as it is acerbic, and all this is on fine display in The Female Persuasion ... if at times her characters can sound a little too on-point, if her ending is a little too tidy, these faults are easy to forgive, because what she has written is not a speech but a novel, one that’s big, necessary, and utterly persuasive.\
Brit Bennett
Positive The Boston Globe The final climax is somewhat hastily told. But this does little to spoil the pleasures of this extraordinary novel, which mines human relationships so deeply and with such empathy that minor plot and pacing quibbles are forgiven. Bennett unspools her story with unusual patience, developing even secondary characters ... Bennett can write exquisite prose ... The notion of the Mothers in a sense praying the whole story into existence is intriguing, but more as a cerebral exercise than a felt experience. In part this is because the Mothers are not developed as characters.
Pamela Erens
Rave The Boston Globe Erens excels at mapping the mind’s movement between present action, memory, and back again — several passages in which the concrete illuminates consciousness and vice-versa achieve an almost Woolfian sublimity, as when Lore, looking at a painting in the hospital, hears Julia’s voice critiquing the art for being amateur and sentimental...But for all the stylistic wonders of Eleven Hours, the book’s success depends on its quieter, structural feats: Erens has built her story with architectural rigor, manipulating plot, perspective, and pacing to build narrative tension and heighten suspense.
Bonnie Jo Campbell
Mixed The Boston Globe “And in the strongest moments in Mothers, Tell Your Daughters,’’ Campbell strays even more deeply into her characters’ experiences at the edges of civilization”