About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Alexandra Fuller
Rave Air Mail Her writing is always a knife pointed straight at the heart, but the subtractions her new book chronicles give it something more like blunt force ... Fuller’s fight for survival is against odds no parent should have to face, and it is unpadded and harsh. It means coming to terms with a loss Fuller is unsure she can handle without Fi to guide her. Fi is concerned with finding a way
Viet Thanh Nguyen
Rave Air Mail Ineluctable ... Dazzling ... No matter where one’s sympathies lie, his act of construction is for all of us.
Yunte Huang
Rave Air Mail Deeply researched ... Give[s] Wong her due.
Helen Schulman
Rave Air Mail What is fiction but the oldest form of virtual reality? Schulman does something especially brave with her storytelling here ... At home with the power of language, Schulman depicts some nauseatingly key moments in contemporary history and around an unquiet globe.
Lynne Olson
Positive Air Mail Follows Desroches-Noblecourt every step along the way. And I mean every step. Deeply researched, it contains in its many detours and side trips a certain amount of historical TMI.
Cormac McCarthy
Rave Avenue The brother and sister are Bobby and Alicia Western, and they usher McCarthy back to the top of his game ... McCarthy picks his titles as carefully as his stunningly arranged words.
Celeste Ng
Rave Avenue Just replay the January 6 hearings, and you’ll know what I mean, and what Ng meticulously, eloquently, and devastatingly gets at in Our Missing Hearts ... Celeste Ng has written another wonder of family lost and found, and about the force of words and art that connect and set free.
Geraldine Brooks
Positive Avenue Tracing the painting over the course of a century and a half, Brooks deftly illustrates how it is entwined with our own ... Brooks doesn’t shy away from confronting — and having her characters face — the same racialized violence inherent in the painting’s creation.
Louise Erdrich
Rave The National Book Reviewhttps://www.thenationalbookreview.com/features/2021/12/2/review-in-louise-erdrichs-latest-covid-and-police-shootings-shape-the-narrative ... richly textured ... Erdrich is ready for that closeup, as she’s always been when it comes to this part of American geography and history ... A landscape of its own, Erdrich’s writing seeks the bright shout of red in a street mural woven from Indigenous myths. It drapes stories over stop lights. It stocks up on beauty in convenience stores. Her granularity celebrates the gritty specific, ravenous for recipes handed down across generations and cultures (don’t get Tookie started on Pollux’s scorched rice), surfs the air waves for entertainment and solace, and reads deep into every word from which her literary encyclopedia of a mind has built this novel. That The Sentence can also be filed under Mystery, its plot arcane, twisted and life-restoring, confirms Erdrich at her best.
Esi Edugyan
Rave The National Book Review The telling is couched in a gentlemanly language of detailed recollection. Its personalized claim on slavery’s annals summons up interesting company. Its associations radiate intellectual and social concerns of a time swept up in the study of nature, the inquiries of science, the urge toward exploration, and the fray of politics. The tensions of class reverberate, as do the meaning of family, the vitality of art, the pressure points of love, and the mystery of the self ... Some of Edugyan’s best writing surfaces in Wash’s exhilaration at seeing nature up close, and his triumphantly revealing its stunning realities ... Her words light a fire under arresting experiences and cloud-clearing ascensions to new heights ... When obliteration tries to leave its calling card questions always arise about whether to intervene in prevailing decisions about posterity’s contents. Washington Black gives life to such choices, siding with better judgments, and contributing a moving chronicle.
R O Kwon
Rave The National Book Review In The Incendiaries, illusion and its stepsibling, deceit, carry out bombardments on the novel’s characters courtesy of others and the self. Delusions get picked off only to have new ones take their place, amplifying the notion that Kwon is scattering clues to a conclusion that has the unknowable up its sleeve. Rather than frustrating, this makes The Incendiaries more captivating, a school where no one ever graduates, continually caught up in the question of what really happens, body and soul. R.O. Kwon excels at the function of making the invisible visible, and delivers signs from on high—that is, where a gifted new writer is performing at a lofty level.
R O Kwon
Rave The National Book Review There’s taking, there’s giving, there are disappearing spaces halfway as Kwon generates waves to ride toward revelation, catastrophe and reinvention. The Incendiaries is written as though language is also a religion. Kwon worships well ... short, succinctly lovely sentences and her willowy eschewing of transitions, between the secular and the sacred. Her balletic writing pirouettes on a period, placing beginnings in their ends, and opposing reckonings into trenchant echo chambers ... Delusions get picked off only to have new ones take their place, amplifying the notion that Kwon is scattering clues to a conclusion that has the unknowable up its sleeve. Rather than frustrating, this makes The Incendiaries more captivating, a school where no one ever graduates, continually caught up in the question of what really happens, body and soul. R.O. Kwon excels at the function of making the invisible visible, and delivers signs from on high—that is, where a gifted new writer is performing at a lofty level.
Rebecca Makkai
Rave NPR Makkai’s writing isn’t the kind that calls attention to itself, allowing the people, emotions, personal incidents and public occurrences of her book to take shape with the force of urgency and the authentic, the grievousness of deceit—by lovers, by families, by hope—and the generosity of romance, sorrow, growth and wonder. She unleashes a mathematics as compelling as her attention to the contradictions within personalities ... She packs her deft array of characters full of surprises that can burst into narrative drama or show their hands gradually in self-revelation, and reconciliation. There is no question that love, no matter how messy or maligned, holds its own, even longer than the plenitude of angers Makkai painfully details and ignites.
Tommy Orange
Rave The National Book Review To lever his subjects into his harsh but mostly forgiving light, Orange leads somberly refulgent search parties of prose into every corner of the particular, Native American geography he has mapped of Oakland, with varied places, identities and epochs conspiring to inhabit its unfriendly earth, its perpetuation of drugs and drinking, its collusion with family fracturing and dysfunction, reaching back to an invading force’s first dissembling schemes for assimilation. It transforms such city signposts as Fruitvale and San Leandro Boulevard —and a fizzled occupation of Alcatraz—into well-worn topographical stops of sadness, anger, stubborn ceremony and wary joy. In spaces—actual and psychic—constructed to negate it, heroism is felt in the quick flashes Orange allows ... He exercises at least three narrative genres: history, fiction, and a filmic unspooling ... fiction of the highest order, landing it on the shores of a world that should be abashed it was unaware it had been awaiting his arrival.
Chang-rae Lee
Rave The Chicago Tribune ...Chang-Rae Lee, the award-winning Korean-American novelist, has decided that the war and its human events are ready for their closeup, delivering a sweeping novel in which connected lives also link mass atrocities seemingly unrelated and far apart ... As ravingly as The Surrendered portrays the deaths, often under torture, of countless war victims –– many of them victors only in name –– Lee also times its sequences to a single, slow, highly particularized dying ... The sign posts in his story, though, point all roads not to Rome but Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, and his re-visiting of military and political history becomes a re-ordering of literary tradition as well ... The intelligence of The Surrendered lies in an awareness that while, on the one hand, wherever there is anguish there will forever be those working to alleviate it, on the other, no force exists powerful enough to entirely eradicate the memory of evil.
Jennifer Egan
Rave The Chicago Tribune The rock 'n' roll novel has become a kind of artistic rite of passage for many writers born into the second half of the last century. It creates instant Americana and illusions of glamour, allows for riffs on togetherness, heartbreak, compromise and self-destruction, and indulges the aspiring hipster in every author. Now Jennifer Egan has written hers. Rather than the knee-jerk genre exercise such efforts often become, though, A Visit from the Goon Squad stands on its own, and we hear it loud and clear.