MixedThe New York Times Book ReviewInstead of delivering on its foreshadowings, the narrative proffers and then whisks away one juicy dramatic possibility after another, letting every potential chance for interesting conflict gently deflate into internal reflection ... The book’s aura of well-behaved detachment is especially disappointing because Shattuck is such a good writer, giving us swaths of cultural and historical background as gracefully and intelligently as she parses the emotional depths of her characters. Every note in the novel rings clear and true, but it never comes fully to life in the way that matters.
Alice Elliott Dark
RaveThe New York Times Book Review... enthralling, masterfully written ... The aftermath of this explosion feels both wholly believable and complexly imagined, true to both women’s characters and the demands of the entire world Dark has so deftly created ... One of the novel’s deepest pleasures lies in the ways in which Dark intertwines the social and personal concerns of the main characters with the historical and political ... The novel’s resolution — unexpected and yet, once we get there, satisfying and inevitable — is handled with such skill in its temporal layering, I had to tip my writerly hat over and over to Dark. What first appears to be the story of two old ladies in Maine turns out to be a sophisticated inquiry into the course of female lives, with time as an instrument of revelation, folding in on itself, opening out, revealing the multilayered histories of both Polly and Agnes as a means of showing a kind of existential truth ... a novel rich with social and psychological insights, both earnest and sly, big ideas grounded in individual emotions, a portrait of a tightly knit community made up of artfully drawn, individual souls.
Liz Hauck
RaveThe New York Times Book Review... [a] beautiful, absorbing new memoir ... Hauck never sugarcoats the difficulties of the boys’ lives and the bare-bones institutional shabbiness of the House. Because she writes with such unvarnished clarity and pragmatism, sudden moments of tenderness burst open on the page ... Still, there’s no redemption in this story, no overcoming of adversity, and no feel-good happy ending ... But it does make another, far more powerful kind of sense.
Leslie Jamison
PanThe Wall Street Journal\"I can absolutely see what Ms. Jamison is going for here, and I applaud her ambition. The problem is that Ms. Jamison can’t or won’t cut the highfalutin language, the unrelentingly earnest, good-student voice and academic distance ... in all this detailed recounting, Ms. Jamison never cops to any of the deep, corrosive anger, curdled into self-loathing, that underlies the self-destructiveness of addiction ... Ms. Jamison seems to skitter away from her own story whenever it starts to get emotionally complicated and therefore interesting, shoehorning in another chunk of her thesis or someone else’s experience instead ... The Recovering gets better in the second half—less stiltedly written, more interesting and at times quite beautiful and moving ... But ultimately, The Recovering is a messy, chockablock brick of a book whose scope and ambition are at odds, throughout, with its author’s professed desire not to dominate the narrative as a soloist.\
Anita Shreve
RaveThe Portland Press HeraldShreve’s storytelling choices feel organically wedded to her writing, a winning and essentially magical alchemy. I forgave improbable plot turns of luck and coincidence just as I forgave breathless sentence fragments and occasional clunky phrasing, because it’s all in service of a cracking good story ... Along with storytelling mojo and stylistic verve, this novel has an excellent, suspenseful premise ... Somehow, Shreve makes all of this feel not only plausible, but necessary and inevitable, if only because this is the fate a character like Grace deserves. And that’s Shreve’s secret, her winning gift. Instead of snorting in disbelief and rolling my eyes and begrudging Grace her unlikely good fortune, I found myself actually rooting for her, as well as admiring Shreve for her narrative generosity ... The Stars Are Fire is so virtuosic, so infallibly readable, it could very well sell more copies than all Shreve’s others combined.
Marina Abramovic
PositiveElleAbramovi?'s page-turner of a narrative—at times shocking, even off-puttingly weird, genuinely moving, and always coruscatingly honest—feels particularly timely at a moment when a flawed but indomitable woman is poised to become the first female president of the United States ... Although Abramovi? describes subsequent pieces and a second marriage, the heart of Walk Through Walls is her love story with Ulay ... gives context to Abramovi?'s need in both art and life for uncompromisingly dangerous intensity, controversy, strong reactions, and even violent negativity.
