PositiveThe Guardian (UK)A sense of playacting pervades the novel ... Allusive, artfully assembled.
Paige McClanahan
RaveThe AtlanticA levelheaded defense of tourism that proposes a genuinely helpful framework for thinking about our own voyages ... The New Tourist is dedicated to fleshing out this bird’s-eye view of tourism as a formidable phenomenon, one that we participate in every time we leave our home country—and one that we ignore at our peril.
Akwaeke Emezi
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewThere’s an art to depicting things going seriously wrong very quickly, and Akwaeke Emezi’s latest novel, Little Rot, is a masterwork of the form ... Mesmerizing ... What gives Little Rot its vitality are its overlapping love stories, its characters’ longing, their acts of devotion and tenderness in defiance of a world in which a soft heart is a liability ... It’s a testament to how complete a sense of contamination Emezi creates in the rest of the novel, particularly in the stomach-turning and dramatically perfect final twist that drags even the reader into complicity. We come away troubled, unsettled — and in some subtle way changed.
Rachel Khong
PositiveThe Guardian (UK)As righteous as [the] message is, its presence in every fold and gesture of Real Americans can make the story feel somewhat static. The novel’s real beauty lies in its amazement at the sheer luck of being alive ... Awe at the details of reality sparkles throughout the novel.
Helen Oyeyemi
MixedThe New York Times Book ReviewThere’s something brittle about the central characters — their interactions feel like a hyper-articulate facsimile of real friendship. Both Hero and Thea remain flat collections of attributes rather than convincing humans. Moments in the story suffer from the same flippant quality ... But Oyeyemi isn’t interested in anything as mundane as what a story might mean. Many details in this book seem like they’re there simply because they’re weird or fun, not necessarily because they gesture at some larger significance ... What warmth there is in Parasol comes from the spark that ignites between a person and a book, a person and another person, or even a person and a city.
Lydia Davis
PositiveThe New York Times Book Review\"...despite the quality of remoteness that permeates all of Davis’s work, in Our Strangers, our present anxieties creep in ... Rather than overt argument, what mainly preoccupies Davis is meticulous, almost obsessive observation of other people: passengers on trains, diners at Salzburg restaurants, a woman at a Watertown Price Chopper attempting to recycle shampoo bottles. The book feels, at times, like a compendium of off-kilter folk tales. But as the collection builds, a quiet statement begins to form: Davis seems to be providing a vision of how we might relate to the people who exist around us, of what an actual community might look like ... As fun as these neighborly fables are, the stories that linger draw their emotional heft from, or capture wry truths about, our closest attachments ... A few stories lose their tautness, particularly the ones that mention the process of their own composition...But even these reveal Davis’s ethic, which is as alert to grammatical constructions as to reality’s specifics.\
Yan Ge
PositiveThe Guardian (UK)Yan Ge’s English debut is preoccupied with language, its failures, and its relationship to human emotions and the raw reality...of life ... As a result of this cosmopolitanism, the stories in Elsewhere are jangly and eclectic, set in wildly different time periods and filled with dissonances ... These stories map out the distance between the head and the gut – the way language can fail to convey the deepest, most visceral facts of life ... At its best, Yan’s writing has an appealing quickness and wit (her drunken poets are especially irresistible). Several stories, however, feel too crammed with ideas; they drop hints and significant details that never quite cohere, and all this signifying gives the prose a stilted abruptness.
Paul Tremblay
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewWeird, self-referential, expertly told ... The most frightening stories in the collection also happen to be the most philosophical ... Often, they end abruptly. But what seems to matter, in all these stories, aren’t the specifics of a grisly end but the emotions they conjure, the way they tinge our own reality after we turn the page.
Justin Cronin
MixedThe New York Times Book ReviewThe narration’s pleasingly sharp details...are some of the many appealing things about The Ferryman, a 538-page book that clips along as effortlessly as you might scroll through a well-curated Instagram feed. There’s something mildly intoxicating, in fact, about entering this utopia, called Prospera, because Cronin’s shrewd world-building allows us to have it both ways ... A careful book with a limited cast, animated by the bonds of parental and romantic love. An undercurrent of grief, organized around a pure, almost unobjectionable family tragedy, forms the book’s emotional core, and the scenes of fatherly doting that recur throughout are so pitch-perfect that they verge at times on treacle. At the same time, the plot features car chases, shootouts, the infiltration of a government building and a twist that completely alters the frame of the story precisely two-thirds of the way through ... Occasionally, the seams show. Cronin’s prose is mostly lucid and considered, but certain patches of overwriting read like attempts to inject unnecessary grandeur into the proceedings ... The twist, after an initial frisson of insight, is disappointingly reminiscent of more than one blockbuster sci-fi movie released in the past two decades, and Cronin’s methodical explanations still aren’t enough to quell lingering questions about how exactly it all works. But his nods to Shakespeare hint at bigger themes ... Maybe this is asking too much of a story meant to engross and entertain, which its satisfying epilogue, in particular, does in spades. The novel delivers everything you’d want from your nightly dreams: an anodyne, occasionally beautiful diversion, rife with patterns and the suggestion of deeper truth that vanishes as soon as you lift your eyes from the last page.
Thuan
RaveAstraIs it any wonder that the main sensory experience of reading Chinatown is a sort of claustrophobic discomfort?...I would sit down with the novel and, after an hour or so, find myself yawning furiously or falling into a trance indistinguishable from the half-sleep one enters on an extremely long bus ride...But that feels like the point: the narrator’s life is about as confined and isolated and marginal as you can get...She’s sardonic about the racism of her fellow teachers, whose distaste for her \'stress-inducing face\' keeps her out of sight when she’s at work...I mentioned above that the narrator is unnamed, but in fact everyone she knows in France calls her Madame Âu — Thụy’s last name, and an ethnically Chinese one...Yet she doesn’t have any real connection to the Chinese French community in the thirteenth arrondissement: \'I can hardly run to them, grasp their hands and say, my husband is also ethnically Chinese\'...She can’t afford to live in the neighborhood, anyway — instead, she commutes there by bus from Belleville to buy roast pigeon for Vĩnh...In one of her dreams she yells, “bù shì yuènán rén” (\'I’m not Vietnamese\' in Mandarin); in another, “bù shì zhōngguó rén” (\'I’m not Chinese\')...The narrator is doubly marginal, disconnected from any kind of community, having rejected her own nationality for her husband, only for him to reject her...Then, of course, there’s the fact that during the course of the book itself she’s immobile, literally trapped in a train car that’s neither departed nor arrived...Chinatown’s first and last sentences are rigid bookends that state the time on the narrator’s watch: the novel takes place over precisely two hours...Chinatown is sad, yes, but it’s also a delightfully prickly and defiantly inscrutable act of resistance: against simple narratives, against our aversion to what we don’t understand, and against anything soullessly practical...It insists that we make space for the things that don’t make sense, most of all our absurd dreams and longings.
Eloghosa Osunde
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewThroughout, a \'monitoring spirit\' named Tatafo, a former assistant of Èkó’s, serves as the novel’s M.C. of sorts, teeing up stories, providing context, introducing themes. If sometimes those sections feel a bit forced, a way to glue together the components of a short story collection into a single narrative, it’s a testament to how absorbing the stories are on their own. Together, they give the sense of an unveiling, culminating in a citywide coming-out party that manages to be at once apocalyptic and bewildering, and even joyous.
Dave Eggers
PanThe New York Times Book ReviewNothing is left to the imagination in The Every, which moves relentlessly from one mocking sendup of tech culture to the next, taking trends like athleisure and public shaming to their fullest, worst extent ... These characters are repulsive, pitiful, obvious warnings of tech’s ability to unhinge. But there’s also a touch of cruelty in Eggers’s attempts to get us to despise them ... [One character\'s] theories seem to announce Eggers’s argument so transparently that the 577-page novel has the feel of a sandwich board with \'THE END IS NIGH\' scrawled on it ... For a defense of nuance and unpredictability, The Every exhibits a startling lack of both ... Very little is left to interpretation ... I wished, often, to be allowed to come to my own conclusions, exercise my own subjectivity — that same endangered faculty the novel mourns ... For a long novel, the story is strikingly static, its message so unchanging that a plot never really develops. Instead, the events that occur in the book’s latter half ...are oddly disjointed and unexplained ... This book is meant to be extreme and off-putting, to scare us straight, sunk as we are in tech complacency ... A funny thing about novels though: Often, the more convinced they are, the more they fail to convince.
Sara Davis
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewAs our narrator loses his grip on reality, Davis drops her readers into successive scenes so fluidly that even we forget what just happened. I raced through the book, marveling at its precise, restrained prose and grasping paranoiacally at small details that might indicate what was real and what wasn’t.
Syed M. Masood
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewMasood’s novel presents a stereoscopic, three-dimensional view of contemporary Muslim America: the way historical conflict in the Middle East lingers in individual lives, the way gossip travels in a close-knit immigrant community ... But swapping between these two perspectives also involves disorienting shifts in register ... Odder still: When our two leads finally meet, 162 pages in, they immediately fall in bed together ... Admittedly, Anvar’s story is more convincing. He’s unfailingly funny, frequently annoying and much more alive than Azza, whose grim life and secretive intensity make it difficult to see her beyond her circumstances. But her perspective is clarifying, too.
Mariana Enriquez, tr. Megan McDowell
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewThere’s something thrilling about other people’s suffering — at least within this collection’s 12 stories of death, sex and the occult. Horrors are relayed in a stylish deadpan ... Enriquez’s plots deteriorate with satisfying celerity ... Largely it’s insatiable women, raggedy slum dwellers and dead children — those who are ordinarily powerless — who wield unholy power in this collection, and they seem uninterested in being reasonable. And Enriquez is particularly adept at capturing the single-minded intensity of teenage girls ... If some of these stories end vaguely, the best ones close on the verge of some transgressive climax ... To Enriquez, there’s pleasure in the perverse.
Mateo Askaripour
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewThis winning novel—or is it a self-help book?—opens with a striking proposition ... Teetering between biting satire and complete earnestness ... What’s not fantasy, though, are the all-too-believable tone-deaf or actively malicious slights Darren/Buck faces at his lily-white office. Thankfully, his quick wit provides cathartic delight: “I should’ve known from the Middle Passage to never trust a white man who says, ‘Take a seat.’”
Dantiel W. Moniz
RaveThe New York Times Book Review...in Moniz’s collection, the ordinary experience of being female is laced with a kind of enchantment ... Entire stories seem bathed in a warm radiance ... Many of these stories draw their force from a well-honed righteousness that turns, at times, into a double-edged sword ... It’s women and girls who really hold sway in this book, their cares and secrets and self-delusions.
Jeff VanderMeer
RaveThe New York Times Book Review... [a] darkly transcendent novel filled with phantasmagoric visions, body horror and tortured beings traversing a blasted desert hellscape. Think The Last Judgment, but with more animals ... pointedly inhabits these strange, nonhuman consciousnesses ... Amid all its grimness, the novel finds some small redemption in the power of love. But VanderMeer’s brilliant formal tricks make love feel abstract and unconvincing by the end, a flimsy human ideal ... It’s precisely that ferocity that makes Dead Astronauts so terrifying and so compelling.
Bob Proehl
MixedThe New York Times Book Review... [a] sprawling, grim novel about our society’s violent inability to deal with difference ... While most of the novel is spent in a few characters’ heads, Proehl acquaints us with the names, abilities and eventual fates of a panoply of secondary cast members. It makes for a bewildering read: both a valiant attempt to delineate an entire society and an unwieldy narrative where depth gets lost in the description of yet another character’s appearance or opinions or quickly sketched back story. I felt a little like one Resonant who discovers he has eyes all over his body and must shut them against a flood of sheer surface detail.
Rob Hart
MixedThe New York Times Book ReviewCloud has all the trappings of a sinister tech company, and MotherCloud’s facilities, payment systems and promotional videos are outlined in excruciating, on-the-nose detail. One wishes the novel’s characters came with as much depth ... As a polemic, The Warehouse is full-throated and sweeping. As a story, though, it might leave customers less than satisfied.
Nicole Chung
PositiveThe RumpusChung knows all too well that living without a narrative of your own existence is a constant, heart-wrenching struggle. But All You Can Ever Know insists that the stories we use to understand ourselves should be allowed as much complexity as the truth dictates ... Chung never gives in to that siren call of comforting fictions—instead, what’s most admirable is her deep commitment, every step of the way, to sit with the hard truth of the matter and accept it ... That conviction is also baked into the structure of the memoir itself, as its point of view shifts between Chung, her parents, her sister Cindy, and even the attorney who handled her adoption ... All You Can Ever Know’s main lesson is that the truth is far more interesting anyway.
Vanessa Hua
MixedThe San Francisco ChronicleHua spends time with many characters, whose dealings lend the novel the spice of family intrigue, a reminder of the inescapability of blood ties, and at least three secret illegitimate children. But her prose plunges us most completely into Scarlett’s mind, a kaleidoscopic, synesthetic experience, relatable and yet remote, as her thoughts flicker over the sights and smells of Chinatown, old memories and astringent remarks on American culture ... But the book’s more dramatic touches strain the reader’s suspension of disbelief. A River of Stars takes its name and its cues from a well-known Chinese legend ... It’s a pretty, sweeping tale, but its elements in the novel are saccharine next to the gritty facts of single, undocumented motherhood in one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods ... By the end, the story’s various threads resolve in a decidedly upbeat celebration of the ingenuity of Chinese immigrants and, by extension, all who come to the States with everything to gain. But its fairy-tale tidiness is also oddly disappointing. It delivers the niggling sense that things don’t quite work out that way in real life, and that the gulf between fantasy and reality is vast indeed.
Elizabeth Rush
MixedBay Nature...the most interesting parts of Rising come when we catch glimpses of people who live by the sea contending with how hard retreating actually is ... The book’s standout moments come when Rush’s subjects get a chance to speak for themselves, but Rush herself proves to be a distracting narrator, especially in the moments when she showily checks her privilege ... For all of Rising’s merits, I came away feeling like it was an exceedingly elegantly worded harangue, bent on exposing our hypocrisies and shot through with a subtle but off-putting undercurrent of contempt for those who disagree with its author. Rush’s argument for retreat is a sound one, but the book brooks no other alternatives. And Rising’s overbearing lyricism ... takes not-so-subtle potshots at any attempt to engineer solutions to the problems sea level rise causes. But I can’t help thinking that for an issue as complex as climate change and one as deeply individual as deciding where to call home, we need all the ideas we can get.
Kate Greathead
MixedThe RumpusThe book is pointed but deadpan about the blithe, self-congratulatory delusions of the uber-privileged. The author is in on the joke, the prose makes clear. But it feels like we’re left waiting for a punchline—all the book does is observe, and as subtle, artful, and polished as Greathead’s writing is, the points she raises are never deeply addressed ... The novel is portrait, not polemic; its arc follows the artless path of life itself. And it’s also curiously hard to pin down—squint at the story one way and you see a woman’s life hollowed out by the very privilege that allows her to coast; look at it from another angle and you see a regular person living a multi-faceted, flawed life. (Really, who isn’t self-deluded at times?) And if we pay very, very close attention to the novel, it seems to promise, we might figure out what all of these well-formed vignettes are driving at. But I have to say that I eventually grew impatient with all of this. Because it felt, ultimately, like Laura & Emma was undermining its own existence by pressing the point: that the story of this privileged white woman was worth paying attention to. But the world doesn’t need to be convinced that the stories of privileged white women are worth paying attention to—no matter how quiet, offbeat or imperfectly human they are.
Jonathan Miles
RaveThe Los Angeles Review of BooksPart of the delight in reading this novel comes from recognition that this is the absurd state of things at this moment in our culture. (Or, to put it in more social media-friendly terms: #2018.) Each little detail Miles inserts about the splashy news coverage, the idiosyncratically punctuated Facebook comments...and the consternation of medical experts is deliciously on point in what amounts to a thorough accounting of our current national madness ... Reading this book feels a bit like holding an artifact from a parallel universe one probability branch over ... He... waxes eloquent on the beauty and necessity of stories, which is, well, a bit convenient coming from a novelist character in a novel ... But this is mostly forgiven, because Miles is a writer so virtuosic that readers will feel themselves becoming better, more observant people from reading him. Part of this is a humor that seems tossed off effortlessly, cropping up as it does in practically every sentence ... Part of why Anatomy feels so expansive is that Miles takes every opportunity to delve into the characters’ backstories ... In Miles’s world, everyone — not just the people shouting the loudest on the internet — is worthy of attention.
Will Boast
PositiveSan Francisco ChronicleThe resulting novel is...an elegant meditation on modern-day emotion...interested in the ways we handle the unwieldy welter of emotions that defines human existence (\'We’re absolutely pickled in it,\' Daphne notes), how we protect ourselves from the pain of others and fail to express our own ... At times, owing in part to Boast’s effortless, ridiculously vivid prose, Daphne’s life feels so intense and archetypal (mythic, even?) that it comes off as a heady literary exercise ... But while the crammed last act neatly provides closure for almost every thread in the book, it’s all so artfully tied off that even the most hard-hearted reader will find Boast’s deep awe of \'what it is to feel\' catching.
Matt Haig
PanThe Los Angeles Review of Books\"Hendrich is a physical manifestation of Tom’s fears of attachment and vulnerability, though he’s more comic book villain than sensitively rendered character ... The reader feels, when sunk into the novel, exactly as he does: immobilized and uncomfortably aware of it. One might sympathize more with Tom’s plight if the book weren’t so woefully explicit, and if the eventual lessons weren’t such easily conjured platitudes ... Despite its central conceit, How to Stop Time fails to convince that Tom is really a product of 400 years on Earth — all his referents and opinions are those of a middle-aged man in the present day.\
Dara Horn
RaveThe Los Angeles Review of Books\"Rachel’s isn’t a simple story about a ghoulish pursuer and a victimized woman. She constantly yearns for him, waits impatiently for his arrival, kisses him with relief when he finally appears. There’s a pathology about it … Eternal Life is resolutely forward-looking — it even features a crucial plot point that involves a cryptocurrency mining rig. At the end of the book, Rachel finds herself holding a newborn in one hand and a smartphone — that symbol of our age — in the other, awash in an unusual sense of peace and possibility.\
Leni Zumas
RaveThe RumpusRed Clocks, Leni Zumas’s fierce, well-formed, hilarious, and blisteringly intelligent novel, is squarely a piece of Trump-era art, a product of the past two trying years in which the main players either brag about sexual assault or won’t even associate with women to whom they aren’t married. The book is loudly, unapologetically political ... This is all so intricate and well-done that every small connection sets off a tiny spark of delighted epiphany ... Buoying this entire novel is Zumas’s writing, which handles both the down-to-earth and the sublime with the same breathtaking accuracy ... This reader felt seen.
Chloe Benjamin
PanThe San Francisco ChronicleSo much of the book’s plot follows from that portentous set-up by necessity that its progress can feel dutiful, almost programmatic ... But she equates ritual, magic, fiction and faith...The result is diffuse; by trying to tackle all these ideas at once, the book’s gestures are sweeping but shallow ... The Immortalists bears marks of obsessive manicuring. The novel self-consciously tries to deliver essential truths about life without outright saying them, but it doesn’t quite let its readers do the open-ended work of piecing those truths together — betraying, perhaps, a mind that hasn’t fully embraced uncertainty itself.
Cherise Wolas
PanThe RumpusResurrection is not a book about an unwilling mother whose worldview is entirely changed once she gives birth. The act of raising a child itself is not ennobling: when Joan’s children are little, she thinks about her life’s ‘soft poetry and hard tediousness, its spectacular, love-ridden times measured against meaningless hours and days and weeks and months.’ It’s a description that could fit pretty much any life, poetic in its averageness … Motherhood is a convenient metaphor, but it feels essentialist—aren’t men capable of that same nourishing self-sacrifice? (Or shouldn’t they be?) Giving unstintingly to someone demanding help sounds noble, but also a little too much like what got Joan into this mess in the first place … The Resurrection of Joan Ashby tries to get at the uplifting power of creation, but in doing so it ends up becoming what so much art created in a vacuum is: self-indulgent and out of touch. And the book ends with a moment that sums that up perfectly.
Jason Fagone
RaveThe San Francisco ChronicleFagone’s book details Elizebeth’s long and rollicking career — one where she lays the foundation of U.S. codebreaking and the intelligence community as we know it — and it reads like some wild cross between a fairy tale and a gripping detective thriller … Fagone is a capable guide to this kaleidoscope of historical material, as comfortable with vivid character description as he is with elegant explanations of technical cipher-untangling … The Woman Who Smashed Codes is winning for so many reasons: Readers will delight in the sheer staggering amount of historical detail Fagone packs into the book; they’ll vicariously feel Elizebeth’s cerebral thrill at finally cracking a code; they’ll cheer her remarkable work as a pioneering codebreaker who happens to be a woman.
Robin Sloan
PositiveThe San Francisco ChronicleLois’ turnaround is satisfying to watch — who doesn’t want all their problems solved by the simple act of baking? — but it goes down a little too easy, more like artificially flavored candy than a loaf of whole wheat ... But after Lois learns a thing or two about how to really live, Sloan’s story expands into something decidedly, and delightfully, weirder ... sustenance-related tales resonate throughout the story until food itself comes across as a sort of grand, delicious imprint of humanity. What Sourdough isn’t concerned about are topical conflicts in food today — characters touch on the follies of industrialized food production, boutique organic farms and GMOs, but only briefly. Instead, whatever lessons we might draw from Sourdough are more personal, ambiguous and hard to extract: having humility, perhaps, or an open mind. And even then, the novel defies clear-cut analysis. It pushes us to do something simpler, to wonder at the weird beauty, set down in Sloan’s matter-of-fact prose, of life — or at least marvel at the strange sights and tastes of a familiar world embellished by a particularly inventive mind.
Sam Kean
RaveThe San Francisco Chronicle...by the end of this delightful, deeply researched exploration, Kean’s assertions will seem justified — the book brims with such fascinating tales of chemical history that it’ll change the very way you think about breathing ... Kean crams the book full of wild yarns told with humorously dramatic flair. Prostitutes get splashed with sulfuric acid! Countries go to war over bird poop! Peasants attack balloons with pitchforks and scythes! There are vignettes sandwiched between chapters; even the endnotes are a revelation. The effect is oddly intimate, the way all good storytelling is — you feel like you’re sharing moments of geeky amusement with a particularly hip chemistry teacher.
Nell Stevens
MixedThe San Francisco ChronicleAs Stevens finally buckles down to write, the memoir moves from travelogue to a cerebral, almost obsessive meditation that begins to fold in on itself...The effect is a dizzying recursion, reflecting the single-mindedness of a writer writing about writing ... Because most of the action is turbulent self-analysis, the book can feel airless and confined at times, locked in by the vast ocean surrounding the island and Stevens’ own mind. But as Stevens wrestles with questions of how (and whether) to turn the grist of life’s happenings into literary material, she paints an honest portrait of writerly neurosis.
