RaveThe Brooklyn RailThe dead in this novel are not all-knowing, nor are they unnamed ... It’s refreshing. The story told here is not ethereal or pedestaled. It’s grounded, planted firmly atop the soil, which allows Sanders’s questions to meet the reader with even more urgency ... Sanders’s debut novel sings, joining a choir of voices alongside Toni Morrison and August Wilson in conjuring memory with contemporary urgency ... Sanders urges her readers to return home, not because it is comfortable, but because there is something to be found in the clutter—something buried away in a box condemned to the attic or hidden among the pages of a photo album: something that might save us.
RaveBrooklyn RailIntimate and wide-spanning ... Embraces many themes, sweetly considering so much contained within the sprawl of diaspora in its meditation on a Nigerian-American family in Chicago ... A captivating exploration.
PositiveBrooklyn RailTaylor’s story this time around is that grappling with Black art and white eyes is the point ... It’s uncomfortable. Taylor looks his audience dead in the eye ... Instead of disputing with critics or ignoring critique outright, Taylor uses his third novel to invite the reader into the criticism itself. Minor Black Figures isn’t a counter, but rather, it’s a story of an artist’s attempt to find his way in the world ... A departure. There’s a vulnerability to the evolution of Wyeth and a willingness to let difficult questions go unanswered—but not to be discarded. He’ll keep asking them. The world will turn.
RaveThe Brooklyn RailA reader might expect to have a steady grasp on Hewitt’s narrative before it can even begin; however, the novel reaches beyond assumption in its ingenuity. Hewitt doesn’t make an attempt at overturning the trope, but rather tactfully distills it ... The closeness shared between James and Luke is heartwarming to read, feeling specific and universal at once. Hewitt’s language is lush and beaming. The world he creates in his storytelling is well-realized ... The rapid turning of the seasons keeps the reader in suspense, waiting to see, desperately, whether or not this soil will allow for blooming.
Brandon Taylor
PositiveBrooklyn RailWhile the rotation of narrators and varied specifics of why each relationship in the web is failing may be dizzying at times, it’s ultimately within the mess where Taylor is most successful. If there is a universal truth that Taylor asserts, it’s misunderstanding ... Taylor pulls back the curtain with each subsequent narration, elevating individual histories and providing personal context. There are absent parents, debilitating injuries, and the loss of relatives in these characters’ backgrounds. As readers, we understand that they’re all making sense of the world through the lens afforded to them; though we remain bitterly exhausted by their bickering ... We sit, enthralled by Taylor’s prose and immersed in his character’s stories, witnesses to the complexity of truth and its resistance against objectivity. We are offered, our gaze peering in from above, perspective. There are sides to take and stances to claim—but no villains. There can’t be.
