PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewA plain-spoken queer coming-of-age story ... While often lovely, may feel like stepping into the past. It showcases a world that people in the United States like to think they’ve moved beyond ... The best of Blessings is made of sentences like these: revelatory yet unresolved, simple yet polyphonic, hopeful yet full of heartbreak.
Brendan Slocumb
PositiveThe New York Time Book Review... it’s remarkable that a life like this makes for such a page-turner in Brendan Slocumb’s debut novel, The Violin Conspiracy, a musical bildungsroman cleverly contained within a literary thriller ... The writing isn’t without its lapses...And the central mystery can be solved by anyone who’s seen a Golden Age Hollywood noir ... Yet Slocumb isn’t too different from his protagonist: a natural. He easily conjures the thrill of mastering a tough musical passage and the tinnitus-like torture of everyday racism. There is a lot of work ahead as he writes his second novel, but as a teacher says to Ray, \'Precision and technique can be learned.\' After all, that’s just practice.
