About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Samantha Leach
Rave The New York Times Book Review In this smart and gripping debut, Leach refreshes a familiar heartbreak by weaving the stories of these three lost young women into a larger, more complicated and ultimately tragic narrative of a nation not so much losing the war on drugs as on a death march every bit as doomed as the last battles in Sparta ... Leach moves the book beyond this fearless and thorough inventory of a complicated friendship ... [Has] the inevitability of a dark fairy-tale ending.
Claire Luchette
Positive New York Times Book Review [A] subtle, resonant debut novel ... One of many feats of narrative restraint that Luchette uses expertly throughout the book: Mundane turning points, muted as prayer, subtly plant the seeds of Agatha’s quiet journey to apostasy ... The power and pleasure of this novel lie in the slow blooming of desire from tiny seeds of doubt.
Emily Winslow
Mixed The New York Times Book Review Surprisingly, given Winslow’s career writing crime fiction, there’s nothing novelistic about the way this memoir unfolds. The detectives and prosecutors who emerge as significant supporting characters are given scant descriptions. Settings are all but invisible. Instead, the focus is on the finer points of law enforcement procedure, with every excruciating moment of the process painstakingly recounted. While much of this is bureaucratic, even tedious, Winslow attempts to inject drama with explosive bits of dialogue and many short, declarative stand-alone sentences, a device repeated to diminishing effect ... [a] meticulously constructed and ultimately terrifying memoir.
Joanna Connors
Rave The New York Times Book Review ...a searing narrative that plumbs both emotional and political depths ... Connors’s forthright exploration of race and poverty enlarges her personal story, turning it into a richer, more complex and ultimately more harrowing account of interwoven traumas ... What’s miraculous about this memoir is Connors’s ability to identify, in clean, lucid prose, evidence of hope — and even beauty — amid such an abundance of misery.