RaveThe New York Journal of Books[Hausmann\'s] narrative is entirely fresh and original ... The novel’s strength is the author’s careful and thoughtful depiction of children as unwitting victims, both of their captivity and the world beyond the perimeter of the only place they’ve known: a house in the woods. Their muted, confused pain is palpable. And indeed, this finely wrought novel actually becomes difficult to read because the author has so expertly rendered the suffering of all its characters ... it is the suffering children in Dear Child who propel this captivating novel to its heartbreaking higher ground.
Hallie Ephron
RaveThe New York Journal of Books... expertly crafted ... the reader is rewarded with a richly embroidered backdrop to a plot that delivers thievery and a murder ... We admire Ephron’s plotting and the weave of all the elements that give the novel its forward propulsion, but we are also grateful for the amount of narrative space she gives to her characters and their various relationships, enough so that the inevitable arrival of the police doesn’t happen until nearly halfway through the book—a virtue, as police procedurals can tend to make one’s eyes glaze over ... Ephron is as strong on character as she is on narrative, and this is a rarity. There are a lot of household names in mystery and suspense who give us blood and guts and heart-rending twists and turns, but more often than not their people never jump off the page...But when a writer of suspense fiction like Ephron nails her characters, the fiction itself becomes prismatic: Because we know these people, they suddenly are capable of all sorts of fascinating and erratic behaviors. And because we care about them, not knowing what they’re going to do only adds to the tension. William Kent Krueger is a master of this blend of writing, and Ephron is right up there with him...And she’s funny too, very funny.
Pascal Mercier, Translated by Barbara Harshav
RaveThe San Francisco Chronicle...not a typical best-seller. It is a meditative novel that builds an uncanny power through a labyrinth of memories and philosophical concepts that illuminate the narrative from within, just as its protagonist will discover the shadows of his neglected soul by bringing the story of another man into the light ... One of the great pleasures of reading Night Train to Lisbon are passages (sometimes quite long) of Prado's pensées (thoughts) that Gregorius translates throughout - more and more facilely as he gets a purchase on Portuguese: dense, provocative snippets that contain startling and original philosophical conceits and questions...a conflict right out of modern philosophy and worth noting... The writing indeed has a seasoned quality to it, as though the ideas themselves have gestated for decades, and then through a creative alchemy, crystallized into a book that manages to be both a narrative and a philosophical work ...a rare reading pleasure.
Helen Macdonald
RaveThe RumpusThe compelling nucleus of H is for Hawk is made up of Macdonald’s often-inconsolable sadness, the portrait of anger over losing her father; the difficulty—and sometimes futility—of being an academic; and most of all the daunting challenge of raising and training a goshawk. When the author describes the natural landscape with precision of a great nature writer, the book positively soars ... Ultimately, H is for Hawk does become a tale of healing and redemption, and this probably accounts for its immense popularity. Yet it remains a singular and completely original document on grieving.
