PositiveThe Boston GlobeExpansive ... The strength of Survival is in its carefully rendered portraits of Lorde’s intimate relationships, both romantic and platonic.
Tiya Miles
PositiveThe Boston GlobeBy elucidating Tubman’s Christian faith and close relationship with her natural environs, Miles succeeds in bringing Tubman’s larger-than-life \"magical\" persona back down to earth and situate her as a woman of her time ... Miles’s Night Flyer adds needed texture to Tubman’s historical caricature, and a big part of its charm is in leaving open the question of whether Brodess’s death was the will of God or the fulfillment of a curse.
Vinson Cunningham
RaveThe Boston GlobeMinutely observed ... The vivid attention to detail in Great Expectations creates a singular, and sobering, mood — an ambient rumination on the recent, and seemingly very distant, past.
James McBride
RaveThe Boston Globe\"...the novel has a lot more to offer than all of that \'who-shot-John nonsense\'—which is a good enough premise for luring the reader into McBride’s rich, carefully drawn portrait of a Depression-era community of African Americans and Jewish immigrants as they live, love, fight, and, of course, work, in a small Midwestern town ... It’s a testament to McBride’s masterful storytelling that, by the end of the book, all that \'who-shot-John nonsense\' with the skeleton down the well hardly matters anymore. By this point, the well is more meaningful for what it symbolizes — a crossroads of heaven, earth, and the underworld, and the way each person must direct his fate by plumbing his own depths.\
A. Igoni Barrett
PositiveThe Barnes & Noble ReviewThere are ongoing and valid debates on 'whom novels are written for' and the editorial pressures on non-white and non-Western authors to 'explain' rather than tell their stories. While Blackass certainly displays the effect of such realities, Barrett craftily transforms these systemic pressures into art. Yes, he 'explains' what pidgin is, but he also describes it as 'the shortest distance between two thoughts' that caused 'mingled voices to beat the air like wings of released doves.'
