RaveUSA TodayIt should not go unsaid that the central characters are African-American, a deliberate choice in a narrative that doesn’t so much adapt as wink at a classic that kept those kinds of characters on the margins. For the most part, they are still on the margins. But No One Is Coming to Save Us pivots the default lens to spotlight their experience — the poverty surrounding them, the pain they harbor and the peace in letting that pain go. In the hands of a less competent author, this could have devolved into mere voyeurism into the traumas and triumphs of black people. Instead, Watts, with her knowing touch and full-bodied prose, delivers a resonant meditation on life and the comfort both in dreaming and in moving forward.
Roxane Gay
RaveUSA TodayIn narratives that brush past as quickly as childhood, Gay manages to capture entire lifetimes, painstakingly sketching women, the underlying drives that give them their shape and the indignities that color the lenses through which they see the world. Gay’s style isn’t paint-by-numbers, either. It’s pointillism — and details such as race, class and sexuality are not missed. Gay has a deft touch with how those intersecting identities mold and shape women’s experiences ... Gay makes mosaics out of these women, seeing them as perfectly imperfect wholes in a world that routinely tries to break them down to pieces.
