PositiveThe Washington Post... acutely vivid details that will resonate with anyone who’s felt that they don’t fit in... Parks’s facility as a vivid storyteller comes as no surprise. Readers familiar with her work in the and the New York Times Magazine know her as a thoughtful, precise journalist who communicates her characters’ humanity and the stakes of a story through evocative details ... While both narratives are compelling, Parks’s writing shines in the story that she can meticulously report: her own ... Parks is an exceptional chronicler of her family and experience. She leans into the beats of stories she’s expertly honed over the years, like the indelible image of her mother, a pregnant bride, throwing up on the preacher at her wedding. She manages the rare feat of writing about her family with both an awareness of its flaws and a respect for privacy. She chooses revealing anecdotes carefully, alluding to family challenges that aren’t hers to share. A self-described listener, she chronicles her pain at a remove; when she writes about being whipped as a kid, it’s as a detached reporter. Some scenes feel straight out of Mary Karr, but without the raw rancor ... Parks often visits her family in nearby West Monroe, and she weaves together her reporting efforts and her evolving relationship with her mother with grace ... Parks struggles to bring that grace to Hudgins’s story. Some of it is the challenging source material — there are scant memories or details of his life to work with. Yet although she conducts ample historical research, combing through census records and newspaper microfiche, she isn’t comfortable conjuring the setting and conditions of Hudgins’s life. As a reader, I longed for a sense of what his life would have been like ... When Parks finally does get hold of the journals, the reveal is anticlimactic. After years of withholding them, Mark and Cheryl let her read them for a few hours, and she reckons with the quotidian sadness of Hudgins’s life. Clearly she hoped for more. After such a prolonged buildup, I wanted more, too: reflection not from Hudgins but from Parks, who occasionally seems like the reluctant subject of her own memoir ... despite the reveal of his journals, Hudgins’s life remains an incomplete contour. When it comes to his story, Parks raises questions that she ultimately shies away from. But while her commitment to reported detail leaves Hudgins’s story a mystery, it makes Parks’s memoir a compelling triumph.
Jeff VanderMeer
RaveWiredBeyond its post-apocalyptic people-eaters, Borne maintains a wry self-awareness that’s rare in dystopias, making it the most necessary VanderMeer book yet ... Borne, through its relatable family structure, offers a dystopia that feels both foreboding and familiar ... Borne contains bleak moments, but it also holds goofiness—as you might expect when the titular character both consumes people and turns into a lamp ... childish hope in the face of a dystopian future is something everyone can use—even if it’s delivered through one of the many mouths of a feathery, pseudopodic terrestrial octopus.
