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Halle Butler
Positive The Washington Post Ambitious ... Butler pushes her darkly humorous, mean-spirited worldview to its limits ... There’s cringeworthy, sometimes triggering material in Banal Nightmare, but it is also quite funny.
Emily Henry
Positive Paste Magazine Henry creates a world that is charming, beautiful, and welcoming without being Hallmark saccharine ... But where Funny Story fails to deliver is on the pretend-lovers front, and the book ultimately amounts to another friends-to-lover story ... As always, Henry knows what she’s doing with Funny Story, but in making Daphne, Miles, and Waning Bay feel real and poignant, she misses out on the opportunity for a few more shenanigans.
Latoya Watkins
Rave The Washington Post An engrossing showcase of ordinary people struggling to get by, carefully and compactly drawn ... Watkins ends Holler, Child on a note of hope and love.
Hilary Leichter
Rave The Washington Post Everything connects in this gentle puzzle-box of a book, but to explain more would be to set sail in a sea of spoilers ... Deeply influenced by the shape and feel of the classic fairy tale, shimmering with the kind of simple language and visceral imagery of a Grimm yarn ... It is in Leichter’s careful treatment of these motifs that the book takes on fresh and vital significance. More than the plot twists or mid-novel disclosures that propel the book forward — twists that more-savvy readers might predict (I did not) — the pleasure of Terrace Story is in the telling, in occupying space with these characters, their moods, their pains and joys.
Jamel Brinkley
Rave The Washington Post Manages to be tonally coherent without the stories ever bleeding into one another; each is separate and memorable in its own right ... A standout title story ... The characters in this collection are all witnesses, hesitant but perceptive, observant sometimes to the point of paralysis. By contrast, Brinkley’s prose is confident and dynamic, the details intensely rendered.
Nicole Cuffy
Rave The Washington Post Dances is especially immersive and visceral, thanks to the raw first-person narration and a muscular prose style ... Happily, Cuffy also injects moments of dry humor. These are welcome interruptions in a story more about mood than plot.
Mary Beth Keane
Positive The Washington Post The main characters do not meet face to face, outside of flashbacks, until it feels somehow too early and too late, making for an oddly timed narrative climax. That said, what Keane captures is poignant and piercing.
Emily Henry
Rave The Washington Post Henry covers new territory. It is, in many ways, the least \'happy\' of her works, less swooning and more longing, with a sense of melancholy permeating throughout ... Most of Henry’s books focus on two characters, but this ensemble piece presents female friendship in all its warmth and woundedness, blessedly absent of misogynist tropes of jealousy and pettiness. Admittedly, Sabrina, Cleo and their counterparts don’t come through as sharply as the two leads, their motives mostly a mystery until the final chapters ... The core of the novel is, without question, the ballad of Harriet and her ex-fiancé, Wyn. The novel is structured in flashbacks that detail their initial attraction, their mutual devotion and the sudden, shattering breakup that devastates them both ... Henry operates at the top of her — and her readers’ — intelligence, telling sophisticated, heartfelt stories that are conscious of the romantic comedy conventions without being overly meta about them ... Happy Place is funny at points, but it is also the closest that Henry has come to writing an old-school melodrama, a heart-rending plot that struggles to express the inexpressible.
Tom Perrotta
Mixed The Los Angeles Review of Books Where the sequel surpasses the original is in how the author keeps faith with the reader’s emotional intelligence on abstract notions of memory and culpability ... the novel’s multiple points of view underscore just why closure remains out of reach ... But why can’t Tracy Flick win? This is fiction, after all. To slow the progress of an unstoppable force just to make her likable is an uneven trade; \'sad victim\' or \'toxic girlboss\' need not be the only two options. And the loud, violent sexism that \'crushes\' women like Tracy is not the only game in town. What if, as a thought experiment, Tracy Flick was allowed to keep on winning, while the men around her continued to flail and fail and cry? Why tell the story of a meditation candle when you can read about a house on fire? ... Reading Perrotta, with his mentions of predators past and present, made me yearn for the savage, unrepentant, uniquely cinematic vision that Payne’s film offers and that Witherspoon’s performance summons into being ... I want more for Tracy Flick, and not more inner peace, more collegiality, more hygge moments around the fire; I want her to win. Big. And it’s not because I like her or because she’s nice. I root for Tracy Flick at her worst, because I like watching her self-important, aggrieved detractors lose.