About Book Marks
Christine Pivovar Christine Pivovar is a fiction writer and reviewer whose work has appeared in The Southeast Review, Hot Metal Bridge, and The Kansas City Star. She lives in Kansas City. She can be found on Twitter @cmpivo
Recent Reviews
Francis Spufford
Rave The Kansas City Star Classic writerly wisdom holds that to make a character interesting, you give him a secret. Spufford plays this game with the reader to perfection ... Though Spufford’s language is believably old-fashioned, it doesn’t feel stuffy or obtuse. He has a great knack for descriptive writing ... The 18th-century style lends the novel a kind of faux authenticity, where we get to both play-act in the past and consider the ways in which our world and the world of our Founding Fathers differ and converge.
J. K. Rowling
Positive The Kansas City Star ...an old-fashioned novel in the tradition of Dickens or his modern-day counterpart Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections, Freedom). There’s a spider web of connected characters, all making their own small threads as part of a larger tapestry of humanity ... The death of Barry Fairbrother (rhymes with Harry; certainly no coincidence) divides the small West Country town of Pagford ... Rowling rotates chapters among many characters’ points of view and brings the omniscient voice to play in large ensemble scenes where we jump from character to character, enjoying a panoramic view of the community and its individual, interrelated conflicts ... At times, the quaint setting and omniscient narrator lull the reader into a sense of being inside a storybook, a world as fictional and removed as Hogwarts ...there’s no denying that you have been told a story by someone who knows just what she’s doing.
Anthony Doerr
Rave The Kansas City Star Science and the natural world here take on the role of the supernatural in a traditional fairy tale. The geology of diamonds forming, the biology of mollusks and snails and other shelled creatures, the mysteries of electromagnetism and trigonometry and radio waves — these are the details that provoke a sense of wonder, in the characters as well as in us … Doerr doesn’t look away from the ugliness of the war, but he doesn’t let it dominate the story...Thus, when moments of violence do appear, they remain more memorable in contrast … Marie-Laure’s blindness allows Doerr to luxuriate in the sensory details of sound, smell and the tactile geometry of objects. In the writing, he sets himself alongside authors...who create historical scenes using poetic language, choosing the sensation of the intense close-up over explanation.
Michael Chabon
Rave The Rumpus Like Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See, it finds wonder and awe in science amidst the brutality of war ... The energy of the novel takes the shape of a parabola of flight. It reaches its emotional high points halfway through and then gradually glides toward a soft landing. Reading it feels like listening to someone tell you about their life. The writing is magical—less manic, perhaps, than other books by Chabon. Its sentences are matter-of-fact but full of the gut-punch metaphors he’s famous for ... the less said about its genre, the better. What matters is that it’s utterly enchanting.
Zadie Smith
Mixed The Kansas City Star ...an admirable if not page-turning story ... It’s when the narrator arrives in Africa that the prose, and the narrator herself, pick up steam ... But though the writing here is sophisticated and competent, it lacks a bit of the joy of those earlier books. Part of this may come from the choice to have the narrator look back at her life from the distance of time. But it’s also the case that Swing Time insists on taking itself completely seriously. Like the narrator’s mother, it has no time for humor and frivolity ... Swing Time is an engaging book, and worth reading for its critical eye on wealthy, Western assumptions about the world. But unlike the Fred Astaire musicals the narrator loves so much, the novel isn’t quite fun, and it is poorer for that.
Margaret Atwood
Mixed The Millions ...we get the sociological angle of teaching Shakespeare in prison, in the context of a play about prisoners. As a metafictional conceit, it’s clever. As a real-world endeavor, it’s admirable. But as drama, it fails to completely connect. Perhaps it’s because none of the numerous characters get as much attention as Felix, and thus are largely reduced to their one or two recognizable characteristics. We don’t get to know them as people ... Neither the idea of Caliban, with all its ripe postcolonial and racial implications, nor the character himself have much impact on Atwood’s story ... The book is fun and readable. There are some delicious turns of phrase but it doesn’t necessarily draw new conclusions about its source material.
Amor Towles
Rave The Kansas City Star ...a highly engaging mosaic of a life, populated by colorful characters enduring the changing tides of history ... Take the nostalgia and whimsy of Wes Anderson’s Grand Budapest Hotel, the decorum of Downton Abbey, add a splash of the 19th-century comedies of manners (Dickens, Thackeray, et al.) and a twist of Russian existentialism, and you’ll arrive at something like this book ... There are so many ways a book like this could go wrong, but Towles pulls it all off — including authorial footnotes in the voice of a historian-cum-Russian-novelist — without a misstep.
Stewart O'Nan
Positive Kansas City Star The writing, like the plot, is stripped back and muted in a way that parallels Brand’s alienation. At times reading the book can leave the reader feeling like Brand, blindfolded and in the back of a car, driving who knows where. We don’t know what’s coming, we can’t see the characters and plots beyond this one, and that experience helps give the novel meaning...City of Secrets is a short, slow burn of a novel that, in a way, affects the reader more like a short story. It pulls you in just in time to make you care, then quickly sends you back out to the world a little bit wiser.
Geraldine Brooks
Pan The Millions There are times when Brooks’s decision to relate the entire story of a very eventful life in 300 pages feels like a series of missed opportunities.