PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewHodges plays for readers a mourning song for the life she and her mother had envisioned for her ... Hodges is at her most vulnerable when she writes of her mother, who as a child immigrated with her family from Korea to Denver, where she began studying the violin at 9 ... Hodges’ writing leaps from the page when she describes how music has the power to both unmoor and ground her. In the essay \'Chaconne,\' she writes movingly about how playing the final movement of Bach’s Partita No. 2 in D minor, written for solo violin, is akin to inhabiting the composer’s mind-set, his \'rage and grief,\' and making it her own.
Samantha Hunt
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewHere the yearning of a daughter eager to understand her father in his absence resonates. How well can one possibly know the dead—or the living, for that matter? Hunt circles this question with growing intensity as she draws lines between her mother’s overstuffed house, her father’s alcoholism and her own relationship to art. In an especially wide-ranging essay, she writes about the love of One Direction that she shares with her daughters, and pieces together literary criticism and personal history relating to Patti Smith, Borges, motherhood and a surgery to remove one of her ovaries.
