RaveLos Angeles Review of BooksOne of the most delightful aspects of Ann Leckie’s writing is the way that seemingly minor details in her fiction have extraordinary significance on much larger scales. In Leckie’s literary worldview, the smallest things often make the biggest difference ... Thematic emphasis—the way that small details (like a character’s obsession with trashy adventure serials) can ultimately shape and influence the largest possible events (such as the fall of an empire)—is one of the hallmarks of Leckie’s work. Her recurring argument is that minor details, events, actions, and influences are never truly minor: everything has consequence, even if it is not immediately visible.
David Mitchell
PositiveThe Los Angeles Review of BooksIn many ways, Utopia Avenue is the Avengers: Endgame of David Mitchell’s novels ... I don’t think that I can, in good conscience, recommend Utopia Avenue to someone who hasn’t first read at least some of Mitchell’s other works — it would be like telling someone to begin with Anne Rice’s The Queen of the Damned (1988) without first reading Interview With the Vampire (1976) and The Vampire Lestat (1985). It’s possible to read Utopia Avenue alone, but you’d be missing much of the excitement from seeing all the various connections coming together ... For Mitchell’s fans, connecting all the dots is one of the great pleasures of reading his books ... Now, more than ever, it seems vital to examine the various ways that our lives are densely interconnected rather than isolated and separate. Utopia Avenue brilliantly explores this theme against the specific backdrop of the utopian wave of revolutionary protests that occurred in the United States, Europe, and beyond in 1968 — a year (similar to 2020 in certain ways) when it suddenly felt like extraordinary social change might be possible on scales previously difficult to imagine ... Mitchell, never succumbs to despair in his fiction.
Alan Moore
RaveLos Angeles Review of BooksMoore detests the corporate franchising of his work, however, and after finishing his occult series Promethea in 2005, he largely moved away from illustrated storytelling, spending the subsequent decade crafting Jerusalem, a massive prose narrative...it’s a sweeping three-volume epic centering on a vast struggle between light and darkness that includes a quest to destroy a cursed Ring of Power that threatens to doom the world ... Each of Jerusalem’s chapters offers a vignette centering on one of the Boroughs’ many diverse inhabitants, including humans, angels, demons, and time-traveling ghosts; the characters’ lives intersect in space and time (and other higher dimensions), forming an intricate web of narrative interconnections ...his novel is a metatextual ritual that aspires to overturn the fundamental economic mythology built into the social fabric of late capitalism — yet the author displays a wistful humility concerning his project’s ultimate efficacy.
