PositiveLos Angeles TimesThe constant portrayal of Brooklyn in the media has made the New York borough ubiquitous. Despite this crisis of setting, Waldman has an uncanny way of getting into the mind — and cold heart — of Nate. And although the novel is about his love affairs in Brooklyn, this is really a novel that reveals — astutely — how Nate thinks.
Elena Ferrante
RaveThe Los Angeles TimesIn Those Who Leave, most everything has already happened. It is a book of evidence, the effects of the past told, never shown, and yet it remains compelling, visceral and immediate. The past's touchstones and many characters who have appeared in the previous volumes are alluded to often, but the book stands alone, gallantly becoming for the reader what it is for Elena Greco — an exercise in remembering … At its root, Those Who Leave is a riveting examination of power...Writing is where Elena's strength lies. Only when she sees the clichés in political rhetoric and finds her subject in feminism — a shift from ‘what it meant to make your own head masculine so that it would be accepted by the culture of men’ — does she experience the power of sexual and artistic possibility.
