RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewI was poring over prose unlike anything I’d previously encountered, prose that felt at times unruly but always athletic in its meta pursuit of clarity ... This is a book that’s not afraid of a tangent. It’s a risky quality, one that may prompt some readers to dismiss Otis Spunkmeyer as rambly, as I did at first. But there is a great deal of genius in the novel’s sprawl ... Thomas loads his sentences and scenes with so much detail that up close they may feel abstruse, at least initially. But like the work of Jackson Pollock, the novel reveals itself the longer one spends time with it. Keep looking, the chaos will start to show its pattern, its rhythm, its dimension and its awe-inspiring color.
James McBride
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewMoves with the precision, magnitude and necessary messiness of some of Gego’s most inspired structures ... The book is a murder mystery locked inside a Great American Novel ... McBride takes his time unfurling the story from there, introducing more and more Chicken Hill residents in the novel’s first third, which might leave some readers feeling as though the plot stalls before it even starts ... His style here won’t please readers who want the author to cut to the chase, and I’ll admit that early on I felt annoyed when yet another new character would take center stage instead of the novel getting on with this business of who did what, how come and what’s going to happen to Dodo? But McBride’s story is not to be rushed ... A charming, smart, heart-blistering and heart-healing novel. Great love bursts through these pages.
Paul Harding
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewAll are rendered humble, human, particular and luminous in Harding’s long, poetic sentences ... started to tense, weary of wading deeper into this story that I knew must end in violence and displacement for its poor, Black cast ... Yet the passages that put me on guard are the same ones that disarmed me. Harding’s prose is mesmerizing ... Whatever apprehensions I had were outweighed by Harding’s powerful music ... Despite Harding’s lush prose, there is a curiosity to these characters, to this world: Until their foreshadowed displacement, it seems the residents of Apple Island move about with little to no awareness of the racial politics of their day ... This novel could be more focused on the turbulence of their eugenics-fueled expulsion, but instead we’re offered moments of family, connection and resilience, which only make the instances of violence and extrication more unsettling and explosive. With the fall of this Eden looming in the wings of the novel, what a careful and caring choice to spend so much time in the grandeur of the lives of the banished ... Not without complication, not without terror, This Other Eden is ultimately a testament of love: love of kin, love of nature, love of art, love of self, love of home. Harding has written a novel out of poetry and sunlight, violent history and tender remembering. The humans he has created are, thankfully, not flattened into props and gimmicks, which sometimes happens when writers work across time and difference; instead they pulse with aliveness, dreamlike but tangible, so real it could make you weep.
Robert Jones Jr
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewMeeting yourself in media is no guarantee that the mirror will be kind or wanted. Instead, it’s often a jagged glass you catch yourself in before it catches you. And even when you know it’s coming, the blood’s still warm and sharp. What of me, of us, was I to witness in The Prophets, the debut novel of Robert Jones Jr., set on an antebellum plantation in Mississippi? ... What I found was an often lyrical and rebellious love story embedded within a tender call-out to Black readers, reaching across time and form to shake something old, mighty in the blood ... One of the blessings of The Prophets is its long memory. Jones uses the voices from the prologue to speak across time, to character and reader alike. These short, lyric-driven chapters struck me as instructive and redemptive attempts at healing historical wounds, tracing a map back to the possibility of our native, queer, warrior Black selves. These voices are Black collective knowledge given shape, the oral tradition speaking in your face and setting you right ... What a fiery kindness [...] this book. A book I entered hesitantly, cautiously, I exited anew — something in me unloosed, running. May this book cast its spell on all of us, restore to us some memory of our most warrior and softest selves.
