MixedThe New York Times Book ReviewIn her absorbing fifth novel, Christina Schwarz...abandons the mythical excitement of the open road for its punishing realities: the gut-wrenching pressure of escape and the injuries that result, bullet-riddled cars, little food and rare sleep, and the dead they leave in their wake ... Schwarz is a vivid storyteller, but keeps a polite distance from the darker impulses that shaped Parker’s life. The couple’s supposed sexual bond lacks nuance, as though the author is blocking a scene rather than pursuing the complex emotions that drive it—and, like so many heroines before her, Bonnie accepts Clyde’s physical mistreatment as a preamble to \'tenderness,\' misconstruing her bruises as proof of his love. Ultimately, it is never fully established what motivates Bonnie, deep in her bones, to live such a reckless, unfulfilled life.
Dan Chaon
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewIn his haunting, strikingly original new novel, Ill Will, Chaon takes formidable risks, dismantling his timeline like a film editor and building the narrative with short, urgent chapters told from a few key perspectives. Intentionally fragmented, the structure echoes the illusive patterns of memory, how life-changing events return to us over long periods of time in vivid scraps and can be tweaked or embellished depending on where our lives are when we remember them ... Chaon brilliantly conveys Dustin’s childhood shame and the subtle ways it survives in the damaged adult he becomes ... I read the concluding sections with increasing horror; the ending, twisting in the author’s assured hands like a Rubik’s Cube, is at once predictable and harrowing. Somehow, it resolved nothing and left me shaken.
Flynn Berry
PositiveThe New York Times Book Review...underneath its hard-driving, page-turning, compulsively readable narrative is a striking, original voice all Berry’s own ... Berry has a keen instinct for plotting and pacing, knowing just what to reveal and how much and when ... some passages read like travelogues, too precious for a character who has lived there her whole life. But this is a minor sin, overshadowed by the novel’s many strengths.
