About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Catherine Newman
Rave The New York Times Book Review Occasionally a writer comes along who seems able to turn every domestic triumph and tear, every dinner concocted, co-sleep endured and I.P.A. swallowed (or not) — in other words, the ordinary stuff of first-world life — into material rife with wit, humor and soul-bearing openness ... Newman...is that sort of writer ... Slim, engrossing ... Impassioned, crackling, vividly detailed writing ... A prominent theme is the passing of time: the loss of youth; the replacement of bodily desire, function and pleasure with the security and privilege, the joy and miracle, of long-term life and love ... Sweet, savory, tenderhearted.
Andrew Ridker
Rave The New York Times Book Review Skillfully enter[s] the viewpoint of all main characters, lending each depth and humanity ... Brisk and assured; occasionally, for comedy or plot propulsion, Ridker summarizes or speeds up a potentially intimate moment. His comic assurance...is reminiscent of Meg Wolitzer ... But if Ridker gently satirizes the world and those in it, his take is more generous than bitter ... Ridker is an optimist. His characters make mistakes, but they pay the price, recover and grow ... They soldier on and try not to lose hope. Just as we hold ours that this talented writer will keep gifting us with his intelligent, bighearted, spew-your-gefilte-fish-funny novels.
Beck Dorey-Stein
Pan The New York Times Book Review Arguably more grating than the clichés and hyperbole are lines that stand out for being clumsy or cloying ... Now, I’m no literary snob. I even (proudly!) hail from armpit New Jersey. But I need more sophisticated writing, as well as a protagonist more evolved than Kate Campbell, for a novel to land in my beach bag. Others surely will disagree, as books about returning home are appealing, and Rock the Boat doesn’t lack energy. And sophomore books are tricky. I’ll look forward to watching the evolution of Dorey-Stein in subject matter and presentation.
Madeline Levine
Positive The New York Times Book Review These are all smart, sensible ideas, if (to me, at least) sometimes obvious; as the mother of two younger 20-somethings, I found this book alternately interesting, important and a bit wistful or idealistic. I appreciate and share Levine’s claim that in our rush to \'keep striving, keep moving,\' we’ve \'lost the capacity for introspection.\' But I disagree that contemporary mothers with meaningful careers suffer when our children leave home because we \'haven’t built a scaffolding to take us from one phase of our lives to the next\'; my \'scaffolding\' was my work, and I appreciate now having time for it, and for myself, in ways I didn’t for decades ... whether you agree with some or all of her ideas, Levine offers eye-opening stats and welcome wisdom to parents raising children in an increasingly unpredictable world. If this book finds its way to those who most need it, surely we will all benefit.
Adrienne Brodeur
Positive The Women’s Review of Books Brodeur’s writing is passionate, sensual, and often deceptively simple. She culls gorgeous details of Cape Cod, with its screeching terns and \'bluefish blitz[es],\' its low-tide displays of \'horseshoe crabs coupling\' and \'moon snails pushing plow-like across the sandy bottom\' of the bay, to make the setting as much a character in this drama as the humans inhabiting it ... Occasionally Brodeur’s omissions, though they kept me turning pages, left me wanting a bit more; toward the end, she refers almost in passing to her \'own checkered history of love affairs and infidelities\' as well as to her habit of (self) cutting, and while a line about the latter was enough in a memoir this broad, the former took me a bit by surprise coming so late and minimally ... Too, the writing can veer into cliché...And occasional sentimentality ... But these minor details displeased only because so much of the writing is literary ... Brodeur shows herself a worthy descendant of her family of writers, including a father who worked for The New Yorker. ... Though this memoir is being billed first as a mother-daughter story, what interests me most is how it depicts both the strengths and the frailty of marriage.