About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Louise Kennedy
Rave The Boston Globe These gritty stories are marked by dark wit and avid artistry. Nothing is sugarcoated in this collection, set in an Ireland in which the compromised present sits adjacent to, and often on top of, an ancient past ... The world might well end in a cul-de-sac, but endings in this collection yield the beginnings of insight, awareness, and spiky, wry humor. Layering past with present, and defeat with determination, The End of the World Is a Cul de Sac abounds with details of the flora, fauna, and folklore of Ireland — and is rich, too, in its exploration of men and women, their roles and cohabitation of complicated, troubled lives. Out of all this, the gimlet-eyed Kennedy gives us, to echo Welty, literature with backbone.
Adrienne Brodeur
Positive The Boston Globe This smart, page-flipping novel has more secrets than you could successfully hide from your Sunday school teacher ... The strengths of this novel, and there are many, lie in the detailed writing about aquatic life, sea creatures, and the Cape Cod setting. Additionally, Adam’s bipolar-driven delusions of grandeur, and his internal rants at intimations of his mortality, are darkly funny and poignant ... But as troubling as the book’s family secrets are, the dynamics are too boiled down and oversimplified in the end. Still, with some winning characters and a page-turning plot — grounded in Brodeur’s love and knowledge of the Cape Cod where she grew up and lives part time when not in Cambridge — Little Monsters offers the pleasures of a smart, absorbing debut novel despite some clumsiness.
Idra Novey
Positive The Boston Globe Does not skirt gritty subjects. Concerned with characters who fall outside easily defined categories, it tackles big questions — like what qualifies as art — as well as the aching human need to be seen ... If the politics and the fairy tale scaffolding seem at times heavy-handed, Take What You Need is still a compelling piece of work.
Lynn Steger Strong
Rave The Boston Globe Psychologically astute, deeply affecting ... Lynn Steger Strong’s writing is economical but packs a gut punch ... Emotionally transcendent.
Karen Joy Fowler
Rave The Boston Globe Riveting ... Fowler has never shirked from a challenge. In this novel, her task is how to contextualize someone whose flaws and fatal misguidedness forever skewed our history ... The climax of the overarching national narrative hangs like a miasma over the novel. We all know the terrible ending. What elevates Booth is the granular texture of what’s beneath the bald facts: the how and the myriad whats and whys, the truths. And there is also Fowler’s trademark dark humor ... If Fowler’s seventh novel occasionally sags from the depth of her prodigious research, Booth is still a massive achievement. In it, Fowler weaves history, family culture, and human cruelties into an insightful reckoning of a past that seems too much a prologue to our American present.
Mina Seckin
Rave The Boston Globe If stories expand us, secrets shrink us, as this deep, wise, and intricate debut novel by Mina Seçkin illustrates ... a pungent mix of politics and family dynamics ... Due to her deep grief over the sudden death of her father in their Brooklyn home the winter before, Sibel’s own temperament is underwater. As the first-person narrator, she is slyly funny and deadpan. Dialogue is delivered without quotation marks, giving the novel an interior quality. This suits the novel well, as Sibel is preoccupied not just with bile and phlegm, but also with big moral questions ... The unspooling of clues that slowly reveals this mystery woman’s identity, and the burdensome secret her grandmother has carried, form the burning, bright core of the novel ... Seçkin’s first novel is almost too loaded. But for the patient, dedicated reader, the rewards are immense. The Four Humors is a novel about connecting the dots — between people, countries, and cultures. Sibel, the aspiring doctor, realizes she doesn’t just have a body, she is a body. And she doesn’t just have a feeling, she could be the feeling ... unites and transports the reader with a throat-tugging ending, demonstrating the power of stories to expand us all.
Francine Prose
Rave The Boston Globe ... witty, recursive, and complex—one could say meta—but also heartfelt. Sincerity has rarely been this much fun ... This novel completely captures the flannel suit decade ... If this novel’s ending seems too tidily wrapped up, and it does, it’s a small misstep in this accomplished work of fiction.
Andrew J. Graff
Rave The Boston Globe ... [an] accomplished debut ... Nature is not mere backdrop here, but a rushing, thrummingly alive presence ... This novel is...romantic, but also compellingly real. And the art and craft of this narrative, apparent from the first page with its sublime constellations of images, offers brutal beauty, the glinting edge of truth, and the possibility of redemption for the fifth-grade boys, and also for the adults chasing them ... both children and adults show they can transcend the thicket of confusion surrounding their personal circumstances and emerge toward more clarity, proving they all are more than just \'poor damn things.\'
Alice Hoffman
Rave The Boston Globe ... the strongest in the trio of her novels about the Owens women ... Hoffman writes deftly, and often beautifully, about nature, and she can plot like, well, a witch, casting a spell on her reader to flip pages, reading ahead for plot twists. That said, the novel sometimes sags when Hoffman becomes enamored of her own research. The display of herbal lore and terminology, even for someone with an inherent interest, is at times heavy-handed. Still, Magic Lessons is a compelling reminder of the past, which as it turns out, is not distant enough from the present.
Lydia Millet
Rave The Boston Globe A Children’s Bible is most successful when read as a parable ... But if it’s a parable, it’s deadpan-funny, told in the first person by Eve, a youngish adolescent, in an economical, spot-on snarky voice ... this is very much a novel for our times. The Greta Thunberg-type anger and disdain the children have for the adults is rooted in pressing concern about climate change and the catastrophe that will arrive unless grown-ups act with grown-up urgency about the degradation of the environment ... In A Children’s Bible, Lydia Millet has given us a compellingly written, compact, slyly funny novel that warns of the catastrophic events that may very well overwhelm us. Unless.
Lindy West
Positive The Minneapolis Star Tribune ... less personal than polemical. When she’s good, she’s very, very good — bracingly original, biting and funny — and when she’s not, the reader still finds brilliant nuggets ... The essays in which West deconstructs cultural icons — such as Adam Sandler or Joan Rivers — who are not touchstones for me, were less effective. Yet even these pieces contain incisive, memorable passages ... Unapologetic, salty, tired of making nice, West gives us another refreshingly nervy essay collection. While not as poignant or funny as her first book, this one is fueled instead by a righteous anger. Let the witches come.
Kate Bolick, Carmen Maria Machado, Jane Smiley, and Jenny Zhang
Rave The Star Tribune Reading the 19th-century novel through a contemporary lens, writers Kate Bolick, Jenny Zhang, Carmen Maria Machado and Jane Smiley have...produced essays that are fresh, layered and insightful ... Jenny Zhang is tasked with analyzing the ever-popular Jo. She disliked Jo when reading Little Women as a girl, under-identifying with her then, and over-identifies with her now, making for an interesting essay that sags a little under her reactivity. With that one misstep, the March sisters march on in this stimulating, discerning and engaging book.
Ed. by Michele Filgate
Rave The Star Tribune Are You Listening? is an affecting, beautiful and profound piece ... Hanauer offers the gift of a real person in her father, warts and all. Art is in the details, as the truism goes, and two pieces underscore that ... Our relationship with our mothers is elemental. In inviting such skilled writers to attempt to fathom this charged connection through the angle of what is unsaid, Filgate, a contributing editor at Literary Hub, \'breaks the silence,\' and the result is resonant, truthful and instructive.
Michelle Dean
Positive The Minneapolis Star Tribune \"As a female writer who cut her intellectual teeth reading the work of these women in magazines and between book covers, I never considered that these writers were not in the center of our shared intellectual history. But if anyone needed convincing, this work of readable scholarship should do it. Dean proves a sharp writer and critic herself.\
Lisa Ko
Mixed The Kansas City Star The Leavers is as politically topical as it is sensitive. It is also uneven, but when good, it is excellent: compelling, well-realized, gritty and complicated ... Ko does a good job of contrasting the difference between noisy New York City and the sleepy small town where Deming finds himself in a white house five times larger than the Bronx apartment. But Kay and Peter are cardboard characters, speaking in strained, clichéd dialogue that matches the author’s arm’s-length relationship to them ... The Leavers is a layered story of leaving, by choice and by force, and of returning to a place that one can find only for oneself: home.
Maria Semple
Positive The Kansas City Star ...if the stakes seem lower in Today Will Be Different, the humor, deft plotting and fresh and witty writing that trademark Semple’s fiction will win you over ... Semple’s third novel is leaner than her first two, but still weighted with cultural signposts and brand names. In fact, even for a plugged-in, curious reader, the signposts are overdone. At novel’s end, Eleanor’s soliloquy widens its view, and this time when she proclaims that 'Today will be different,' you believe her.
Ann Patchett
Rave The Kansas City Star ...a sly book about storytelling, a story about a single incident — really two pivotal incidents — spun out over the length of a narrative constructed like a conversation but encompassing decades ... this book is breathtakingly great ... an affecting, beautiful, truthful novel.
Annie Proulx
Mixed The Kansas City Star The best thing about Barkskins, Annie Proulx’s hefty fifth novel, is its ambition, sweep and scope. The worst thing: its ambition, sweep and scope ... Although Proulx often holds her characters at arm’s length and commits some formulaic writing when introducing minor characters more as caricatures, she writes about nature with respect. Particularly when she is describing the night sky, her prose breaks through into poetry ... This historical novel is as sweeping, and as flawed, as its subjects. The reader feels well-educated, but somewhat exhausted, at novel’s end.
Louise Erdrich
Rave The Kansas City Star LaRose is told with aching understanding by Erdrich, who has great affection for her characters. This timeless 15th novel stands as one of Erdrich’s best: comprehending and comprehensive, full of cascading, resonant details punctuated with spiky humor.
Idra Novey
Rave The Kansas City Star With touches of mystery, commentary about the art of translating as well as inventing fiction, prose that reads like poetry as well as snatches of actual poems, and wry inter-chapter definitions, Ways to Disappear is a gem.
Rachel Cantor
Mixed The Minneapolis Star Tribune Good on Paper is well-suited to our global world: set in New York, with plot threads in Rome. Though at times a bit too tied to textual analysis of Dante's work, and a little too taken with wordplay, there is an absorbing story here, and affectionate character development.