PositiveThe Los Angeles TimesStriking ... Entertaining, political and exquisitely gruesome, these stories summon terror against the backdrop of everyday horrors ... Lacks the thoroughly imagined lore of Enríquez’s 600-page novel ... But Enríquez still manages to suffuse these stories with a sense of place, politics and history ... Engrossing ... Strange and mesmerizing.
Mieko Kawakami, tr. David Boyd and Sam Bett
RaveHarvard ReviewThough the monologues in Heaven investigate the human condition, they aren’t dry. They ground the novel in the messy rawness of adolescence ... Kojima is unpolished, and sometimes even frustratingly imprecise, but the vulnerability in these conversations cements this friendship as once-in-a-lifetime. And the certainty and passion in Kojima’s voice fascinate. She is resilient, making her a perfect foil for a narrator convinced of his own weakness. Heaven provokes both contemplation and instinctual dread. However much we may want to pull away, Kawakami drags us into the narrator’s increasingly brutal encounters ... Heaven has more to say about what it feels like to live than about what life means. The novel’s climax, which begins as yet another bullying session, is painful, ecstatic, dreamlike, and—finally—transformative. We might reread the culminating scene multiple times, surfacing more meaning and discomfort in each pass. We’ll find no answers, but we will marvel at how thoroughly Kawakami has succeeded at touching truth.
