MixedThe New York Times Book ReviewOffers readers the delectable pleasure of watching an outwardly perfect family crumble under its own arrogance and rot ... May remind readers of Zora Neale Hurston’s work. At her best, Citchens can effortlessly convey history, personality and desire ... Diamond is clearly the character to root for. The other major characters aren’t as absorbing ... Many crucial dialogue exchanges are skipped. Over and over, conversations that might elucidate the characters’ attitudes and reveal the changing dynamics of their relationships are missing ... This novel owes its appeal to Citchens’s intimate knowledge of the setting and its residents; I only wish she took more opportunities to have them intimately engage one another.
Michael Farris Smith
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewIn Salvage This World, Michael Farris Smith bolsters his reputation as an intoxicating literary stylist. For Southern writers (Smith is from Mississippi), a comparison to Cormac McCarthy can be both an honor and an act of oppression, but McCarthy is an unavoidable point of reference for the bleak elegance of Smith’s prose ... The solemn, rhythmic tone is well employed in service of the sodden, gray setting ... While Smith’s enthralling narrative talents are plentifully on display in this book, I did find the dialogue a slight letdown. My expectation to receive deeper access to the idiosyncratic personalities of the characters often went unfulfilled, the exchanges too brief or too focused on already-known information. I kept hoping the dialogue would supply avenues for the characters to distinguish themselves from the overarching prickly, reticent demeanor that seems to spring right from the dismal setting and infect everyone in the novel, but it was rarely equal to that task ... All in all, Salvage This World is a bruising, bracing read by a hell of a writer. If you consider life too short for uninspired sentences or nondescript locales, this book is for you.
