RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewThe experience of reading Mary Beth Keane’s absorbing new novel, The Half Moon, feels — pleasantly — like breathing, or maybe just living ... These are not earth-shattering or groundbreaking observations, but they are precisely why it’s such a pleasure to sink into Keane’s quietly luminous prose: Her recordings of the small, significant moments of life have a way of standing for something larger ... A slightly bizarre series of intrigues colors the end of The Half Moon, ... But suffice it to say that the logistics of the plot are secondary: Malcolm and Jess provide the real momentum behind this novel. While marriage may be an endless, evolving equation of events and decisions that increase or decrease the original store of love, in the end, one hopes, there is still, indeed, love. Keane understands this. Her perceptive, generous observations and attention to her characters’ inner lives make for a book that is much, much more than the sum of its characters. She manages to find the extraordinary grace in our achingly ordinary world.
Elizabeth McCracken
RaveThe New York Times Book Review... soulful, melancholy ... McCracken deftly evokes how so many of us feel about our mothers: that they are just there, and always there, and that any intimation that they were not always there or weren’t ever just as they are is an affront to the primacy of their connection to their child. Many children will never forget the moment they realized that their mother was a separate human being, who made mistakes and had faults and foibles all their own, separate from their own selves. This existential shock reverberates throughout McCracken’s book, coupled with the shock of that mother no longer being there ... In this vivid composition, McCracken paints the final layer of the portrait of the mother she has so painstakingly drawn in the preceding pages ... \'Don’t trust a writer who gives out advice,\' McCracken warns in the first chapter. But the irony is, her words create an exquisite alchemy that makes a reader ready to follow her anywhere, believe every word she writes down. Is this book a novel or is it a memoir? It matters not at all. With every vital, potent sentence, McCracken conveys the electric and primal nature of that first fundamental love.
Laura Zigman
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewWhat is the name of the emotion that mixes exasperation with sympathy? This was the question going through my head as I read Separation Anxiety, Laura Zigman’s wistful and somewhat erratic fifth novel. The story of Judy Vogel, a middle-aged writer, mother and wife consumed with loneliness as her husband and son drift away, it is a tale that elicits a curious combination of those feelings ... It is unclear why otherwise passive people have decided to get divorced since they seem to like each other and are kind. This dynamic, at least, is fresh; you root for Zigman’s decent and vulnerable characters even while wanting to give them a good shake ... Zigman has brought her ur-self firmly into middle age — and while she is a familiar, self-deprecating, likable protagonist with self-esteem issues, one does find oneself wondering why, with the supposed vantage point of some years, she hasn’t yet gotten out from under the weight of her own judgment.