PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewTremblay is an undeniably skillful writer. The sentences are lean where they need to be, decorative where they need to be. He’s especially good at the creepy stuff ... He knows how to drive the story forward, while affording it a layer of linguistic color that makes the whole affair feel vastly more engaging, despite the fact that the viral-zombie conceit is hardly original ... At 300 high-velocity pages, the tale whizzes along, taking barely more time to read than the events it describes ... Yet one has the feeling that Tremblay is reaching for a bigger audience, and in this regard, he has uneven success. Though appealing, the characters Rams and Natalie are thin and familiar, their friendship lacking much complexity or depth ... Lacking the unpredictable forces of personality, the story can go only so many ways, and many readers will see the end of Tremblay’s novel coming a mile off.
Omar El Akkad
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewThere’s a fair amount of authorial winking and seat-of-the-pants science going on here, but never mind; El Akkad is far less concerned with the mechanics of his conceit than its psychological underpinnings ... the novel’s thriller premise notwithstanding, El Akkad applies a literary writer’s care to his depiction of Sarat’s psychological unpacking and the sensory details of her life, first in Camp Patience, then on the move as a freelance insurgent ... Whether read as a cautionary tale of partisanship run amok, an allegory of past conflicts or a study of the psychology of war, American War is a deeply unsettling novel. The only comfort the story offers is that it’s a work of fiction. For the time being, anyway.
