PositiveThe Los Angeles TimesThanks to the prodigious talent of author Miriam Toews, All My Puny Sorrows is an off-kilter, frequently funny and begrudgingly life-affirming romp through, well, death ... Her losses are the reader’s gain: Only an author with an intimate relationship with suicide could have written a novel with such wincingly painful honesty and mordant humor ... Characters, although always entertaining and sharply drawn, occasionally feel more like a collection of outrageous quirks than plausible human beings. Readers who haven’t earned a master’s in Comp-Lit will also spend a lot of time on Wikipedia looking up the mind-boggling number of intellectuals that Toews’ characters casually quote in conversation ... But if the book occasionally feels like an existential debate, it is not without a healthy dollop of self-awareness ... Toews’ great strength lies in her ability to see both sides of this argument and portray them with equal empathy.
Justin Cronin
MixedThe San Francisco ChronicleIf The Passage was concerned with the battle between man and beast and the despair inherent in being a survivor, The Twelve has at its core the question of what makes a human being human. Despite its title, The Twelve is not really a book about hunting down the remaining 12 original virals – Cronin clearly understood that this would quickly start to seem repetitive. Instead, this book switches gears to examine a new breed of immortal humans who have been infected, to one degree or another, with the virus … The fact that The Twelve requires a four-page dramatis personae to keep everyone straight is perhaps a sign that Cronin could have lost a character or two...and Cronin's jumpy writing style – no cliffhanger complete without a subsequent total change of setting – can be utterly maddening, even if he does tie all the disparate threads together in the end.
Ian McEwan
PanThe Los Angeles TimesThe spy conceit of Sweet Tooth proves disappointingly thin. McEwan makes a halfhearted attempt at '70s espionage intrigue — a truncated subplot about whether Canning was a Russian double agent, padded with some paranoia about surveillance teams called ‘The Watchers’ and a mysterious bloodstained mattress in a safe house — but the drama is much ado about nothing of great interest. The real subject of this novel is literature. Sweet Tooth is ultimately about the relationship between writers and readers: how frequently the writing of fiction is a form of infiltration and identity theft, how readers seek themselves in books, how much we know about an author from his creations … What we learn at the end should make readers want to flip back through the book and re-read it with opened eyes; unfortunately, the experience of wading through Sweet Tooth the first time dispels much urge to read it again.
Ann Patchett
RaveThe Los Angeles TimesCommonwealth is a beautiful puzzle box of a book, one that doesn’t clearly fit together until all of a sudden, midway through, it does. Unpretentious and ultimately heartbreaking, miniaturist but also sprawling, Commonwealth is a story about family stories ... feels like Patchett’s most intimate novel, and is without a doubt one of her best.
Jon Wray
RaveThe Los Angeles TimesWray's essentially attempting a tightrope-walk between the logical and the ludicrous, a balletic exploration of the meaning of time and memory and consciousness, that embraces both the science and the fantasy of it all. In this, he succeeds. It's the other parts of the book, the plot and characters, that lose their balance.
Isabel Allende
PanThe Los Angeles TimesThe Japanese Lover is a humorless and earthbound disappointment.
