PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewThis narration, timeless and omnipresent, telescopes out from the story of the Porters and places the family in a larger context across time. It made their story feel larger, part of an ancestral order of tales of families and love and magic, but it also acted as an obstruction at times, insulating the reader from the story at hand.
Sarah M. Broom
PositiveThe San Francisco ChronicleBroom’s memoir was written, it feels, with the Yellow House, the house she grew up in and which would later be destroyed in the storm, pointing fingers at her back ... The structural choice is one that creates a feeling of a coming wave. Reading through the first two movements, one can almost hear the rush of water approach ... a book that dwells in the places that shape us, haunt us, and upon which we leave a mark ... Broom presents a powerful eulogy to the places ruined by the storm, while highlighting the history and the racial inequities that made such a disaster possible.
Colson Whitehead
RaveSan Francisco ChronicleWhitehead’s The Nickel Boys, though a work of historical fiction, manages to work on a level that comments on the plight of black men’s lives today ... In this way, The Nickel Boys feels expansive and important ... Whitehead’s prose feels incandescent and controlled, like the steady blue flame of a pilot light ... Whitehead’s writing is distinctively statuesque and pared down, but it is most powerful when savagely tracing familiar institutional negligence toward black lives.
Namwali Serpell
RaveThe BelieverHer insight and cutting wit reveal these national borders as political fabrications imposed on people and their traditions ... In the course of a wondrous and formally itinerant 527 pages, The Old Drift happily refuses categorization, touching down in thriller, sci-fi, magical-realist, historical, and socio-political territories as the needs of the novel and Serpell’s prodigious imagination require ... gathers an enormous cast that dramatizes Zambia’s multicultural milieu, while meditating on the historical conditions that produced it ... In a novel that frames the founding of national borders as the products of unfit men’s reckless behavior, it is only appropriate that the writing should itself dismiss the idea of genre boundaries ... this sense of possibility is present in the incandescent precision of Serpell’s prose ... Serpell’s command of the minutia of sentence craft, and her ability to balance that craft against this novel’s massive historical scale is thrilling. The Old Drift feels like entering a wormhole, where time is both slow enough for us to note the way a woman’s dress knocks a wine glass off balance as she walks by, and vast enough that we may see exactly how feeble, how ultimately incidental to human history, nations are. By writing across history and fiction, Serpell has written a novel where micro and macroscopic scales are inextricably combined, where power might be accidental, but the balancing of the scales is always by design.
