RaveChicago Review of Books...[a] luminous debut novel ... The story is told through a lens blurred by longing and loss, and every sentence is filled with it. Kwon seems to breathe beautiful sentences onto the page ... Reading The Incendiaries is like watching the work of a great auteur, where every shot and shadow is constructed to convey a theme or emotion, and to finish reading the book is to carry feelings of yearning and regret for days afterward ... The Incendiaries is an extraordinary novel in so many ways: the finely hewn beauty of its language, the layering of its themes, the ways that it reveals truth through narrative unreliability, and the remarkable way it makes one uncomfortable with one’s sympathies.
