MixedThe Los Angeles Review of Books...a witty, quip-dense romp of a novel ... Nicotine has all the verve and sparkle of a young thing that revels in the shallowness of youth. It brims with zany bustle, but misses the forms of consequence that conventionally give novels weight. ... lacks a certain conviction, some trace of an attitude that stands at a distance from its characters, that would make the novel’s social observations more incisive ... Much of the novel takes place in the emotional register of an emoticon. Yet for all its zeitgesty patter, in a post-9/11, post-Bush, post-Ferguson, Trump-Clinton climate, a novel in which everyone is safe and nothing ever really hurts seems more avoidant than trenchant.
Andria Williams
RaveThe Los Angeles Review of BooksAlthough her descriptions of the reactor’s mechanics are absorbing, Williams’s novel is concerned less with technical failures than with human ones, particularly a conformist culture’s pernicious habit of mistaking that which endangers — military and marital discipline, masculine and nuclear power — for that which safeguards.
Lauren Groff
PositiveLos Angeles Review of Books\"In Groff’s telling, the darkness of marriage does not seem particularly bad — the bonds that hold Mathilde and Lotto together are no less real for not being made of full disclosure. Groff’s hard, realist vision of marriage — not the fairy-tale voices of the fates that embroider it — gives her novel its considerable force.\
