PositiveNew York Journal of BooksHow characters react to their historical moment is a major theme of the novel, but Three Muses is neither pedantic nor philosophical ... Toll infuses the behaviors and beliefs of the time with a contemporary understanding of psychology and power ... There is an audaciousness to Toll’s ambition in taking on both the Holocaust and the mid-century dance world, and she mostly pulls it off ... Toll’s language often strains to capture the passion and intelligence of Katya’s dancing, and Yanakov’s choreography comes across as more pretention than genius. However, the characters are engaging, their situations and their choices seem real, and the narrative of their coming together pulls one along convincingly ... It is not hard to admire Toll’s craft.
Jess McHugh
PositiveWashington Independent Review of Books\"The chapter on The McGuffey Readers is particularly rich, as it delves into 19th-century debates on education, religion, and immigration. McGuffey’s original Readers were explicitly Protestant, anti-Catholic, and anti-Semitic, and key to spreading the narrative of the Pilgrims and the first Thanksgiving. McHugh notes the importance of these shared myths to a rapidly growing, politically fractious country. She also writes tellingly of their continued use ... Among McHugh’s accomplishments is the deft way she establishes the evolution of ideas across the books she explores ... Another aspect of Americanon that makes it so readable is the way McHugh blends in the biographies of the writers she covers ... If there is a flaw in Americanon, it is its repetitiveness ... As the principles repeat, so do the ulterior motives of the writers behind them ... Of course, repetition is part of the point, just as part of these books’ point—or, if not their point, their effect nevertheless—was to obscure reality and harden myths into truth ... McHugh’s achievement in Americanon is that she makes clear some of the problems with these aspirations are baked into their design and not a result of our frequently having fallen short of them.
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Jessie Van Eerden
PositiveNew York Journal of Books... a surprising protagonist and a moving story full of unexpected moments that never stretch into the bizarre or unrealistic ... a voice of rural poverty that appears to transcend the limitations of geography and class and that gives that community a full intellectual and emotional vocabulary ... a plot that is at once both direct and meandering ... Not all of the minor characters—and there are many—come to life with specificity, and there are times when Frankie goes on at some length about people it’s hard to identify, let alone genuinely care about. But the community is portrayed with a depth of emotion and visual clarity that creates a complex stew of deadend jobs and deep relationships, abusive men, and women’s solidarity ... The narrative is told in a long, rambling letter to the long-dead Ruth, whom Frankie knew of, but never met. While she never appears nor speaks, Ruth watches over this narrative like a guardian intellect, having pushed Mave toward selfhood and encouraged Frankie to read and write.
