RaveLos Angeles Review of Books... an engrossing, voyeuristically vivid account of [Taddeo\'s] subjects’ longings—not only their sexual desires but also the feelings informing their relationships with their families and communities, with men and with other women ... Taddeo gives us pornographically detailed scenes of Lina and her lover, and relays pages’ worth of sexy text messages. I felt Lina’s joy with the same captivated intensity that I felt Maggie’s pain and betrayal ... Reading Three Women is a deeply immersive experience. Taddeo rarely interjects to give her two cents on any particular scene; her prologue and epilogue are brief, too, allowing the three stories to stand alone as dispatches from the world of female longing and loss. She does not offer solutions to these women’s problems or hope for their outcomes. Her choice of details—what she holds up as worthy of our consideration—is her way of curating what she thinks is essential about their narratives ... Taddeo has, indeed, afforded her subjects the intimate complexity and lyrical treatment of characters in novels. I pictured them vividly. Though each individual’s story line suffers a bit from being just one-third of the whole—and Maggie’s feels like the centerpiece, with Lina’s and Sloane’s narrative arcs less fully realized—their portraits together are smartly told and deeply moving.
Juliet Escoria
PositiveChicago Review of Books\"Astutely, Escoria depicts not only the pain and confusion of mental illness, but also its daily humiliations and inconveniences ... The second half of the book takes place after Juliet’s latter suicide attempt, and it presents a more compelling narrative arc and immersive setting than the first half ... Juliet the Maniac is a wild ride of a book, and I was rooting for Juliet every page along the way.\
Yiyun Li
PositiveChicago Review of Books\"... Li’s readers can expect a spare beauty from her prose, fine-tuned metaphors from an author who knows that great care is required to illuminate subjects as thorny and intimate as grief and depression ... In this novel about the potency of language and love, Li, too, has crafted a world in which the dead are still with us, if only we reach out and speak to them.\
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay[/caption]
