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Recent Reviews
Rowan Hisayo Buchanan
Rave The Los Angeles Review of Books Jay, the son, is the other main character of the book, which alternates between the third-person telling of Yuki’s story and Jay’s first-person narration. The tones of their chapters are vastly different, proving Buchanan’s versatility as a writer in her ability to both maintain distance from and be intimate with her characters ... Few people in Harmless Like You are particularly likeable, which is another strength of the book; the novel’s inhabitants are still entirely relatable, their motives and methods so natural and understandable that even when entirely unexpected, readers are unlikely to avoid emotionally connecting with them ... It’s hard to describe art well in fiction, but the concepts Buchanan gives Yuki to work with are both brilliant and brilliantly gimmicky ... Looking at the book as a whole, there are so many mature notions of patience, sacrifice, and terrible sadness that it’s startling to realize how young the author of the book is — she was 27 when the novel came out in the United Kingdom, younger when she wrote it. Buchanan must be, like Yuki herself, an old soul. But unlike Yuki, there is no doubt about how good an artist she is, for this book demonstrates that she is an excellent one.
Zadie Smith
Rave Electric Literature ...a magnificent, mature novel ... The most noticeable thing about Swing Time, at least for a longtime reader of Smith’s work, is how much of it defies the old writing workshop adage?—?it tells as often as, if not more than, it shows. Paragraphs can last up to a page in length, the narration is first person, and there is a Jamesian quality to some of the sentences that is unexpected for Smith, who is an excellent wordsmith and always has been but who has tended to give her characters voice through their words more often than through their internal narration. All of which is to say that Swing Time is surprising?—?not that it is anything less than excellent.
Eimear McBride
Rave Electric Literature ...the young woman and the older man is a trope if there ever was one, but Eimear McBride handles these people atypically, gracefully, and she addresses each and every possible cliché within the characters’ thoughts and talks ... The emotional resonance that is in the act of identifying unnamed characters cannot be understated ... the way Eimear McBride writes makes what is a relatively simple story feel as weighty, important, and visceral as love stories are to us in life. Much like Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, which also has a simple plot when laid out as a sequence of events, McBride makes beauty and importance in everyday reality.
Garth Greenwell
Positive Electric Literature What Belongs to You is a beautiful first book, with a focus on communication, on understanding (or not), often literally, what other people are saying.