About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Emily Rapp Black
Rave Alta \"It goes without saying that Black is a gorgeous writer. Her first two books...met with deserved acclaim. Still, it should be said: first, because this is a review, and gorgeous counts; second, because with a book like this we might forget to remark on the prose and offer condolences instead ... Black’s voice is singularly lyrical, singularly bracing. She is obsessed with the potency of language, offering favorite phrases and lines, sometimes contextualizing but more often quoting with the confidence of a reader who has made the sentences her own ... How bolstered I felt when I read those words, and when I finished this book. Sadder, happier, human-er. Grateful for the sanctuary.\
Kathryn Harrison
Rave Los Angeles Review of Books \"As with the best stories, whatever the genre — fiction, nonfiction, fairy tale — it turns out On Sunset is more than one thing: not simply nostalgic, but tinged with anticipated sorrow and grief. Harrison’s touch is light (she’s a gorgeous writer), but, finally, notwithstanding the age of the narrator, her book is for grown-ups, and its adult concerns extend beyond the fate of a house ... On Sunset, as wise and all-seeing as it turns out to be, is also a mostly happy story. One which I am wholly grateful to have read, and whole-heartedly recommend. It will, as with the best, make you laugh and cry. And it will make you remember how it was to be a child. And that children are listening. And that whatever we tell ourselves for whatever reasons, we tell each other stories in order to live.\
Helen Macdonald
Rave The Los Angeles Review of Books MacDonald’s memoir — an account of reckoning with grief in the wake her father’s death; also a close reading of T.H. White’s The Goshawk — is unusually layered and rich ... H Is for Hawk is about attention: about seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, crying, screaming, raging, shaking, and losing your shit as if it were happening all of it, now — it is, in short, quite deliberately about reckoning with the wild within as well as without, as each informs, mimics, and illuminates the other.
Sue Klebold
Positive The Los Angeles Times Throughout, Sue Klebold is articulate, thorough and thoughtful. Her agenda? At least in part to redeem herself, if not Dylan, in our eyes, though the line gets necessarily fuzzy ... But Klebold writes as if to convince herself. And how to fault her? How not to wonder instead how she has managed to survive.