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Recent Reviews
Leland Cheuk
Rave Book and Film Globe Leland Cheuk’s second novel, No Good Very Bad Asian, bears a freshness that the majority of novels simply can’t conjure. It’s a rare book, sprouting fanciful ideas from a realistic emotional foundation. It covers racism, family, belonging, and the meaning of a life well lived while posing as a celebrity rise-and-fall novel ... The novel picks delicately at knotty ideas and contradictions about life as an Asian in America ... But all this meaning doesn’t make the novel heavy. On the contrary, it’s genuinely hilarious ... No Good Very Bad Asian, for all the unlikeliness of its plot, echoes life. Many of its background ideas...are deliberately silly, and the plot of Sirius’s life does not proceed in a smooth line toward success or failure. But Cheuk’s confident style and skilled toggling between moods make the book a terrific read. It may not be the most outrageous showbiz novel out there, nor the most heartfelt, but it balances both of those strong flavors with precision and kindness.
Helen Oyeyemi
Rave Locus Make no mistake: Helen Oyeyemi’s sixth novel is literary fiction, with a profound central metaphor and wander­ing, unfixed storylines. Its language is heady and attention-getting ... But it’s also a whimsical, unlikely novel of fictional countries, talking dolls, and ghostly realms. The genius of Oyeyemi’s writing lies in the collision of fantasti­cal whimsy with acidic malice; this is not a fairy tale where the reader feels safe entering the forest, because it’s not at all certain that the cute children will ever come out again. That tension, and Oyey­emi’s extraordinary imagination, lift Gingerbread well above the average literary fantasy and make it something lasting, something rich and lovely and tangy and dark ... Even for a fairy tale, Gingerbread tells a highly improbable story, and it’s packaged in a lopsided and unpredictable narrative. That’s what makes it such a terrific read. It’s a book flawlessly tuned to the most obscure radio station on the dial, and, even though it’s unlike most other fiction – fantasy, literary, or crossover – its delights are bottomless.
Sjón, Trans. by Victoria Cribb
Mixed The Los Angeles Review of Books Yes, he writes beautifully, thoughtfully, leaping from bawdy jokes to lyrical considerations of life and death. The 500-plus pages of the trilogy clip along as if the book is half that length ... And his characters—even those as well trodden as the Archangel Gabriel—have lively voices and definitive motivations ... The tension of these mysteries makes every page hum ... However, the sprawl of the trilogy, the messiness, the tonal contradictions, the storytelling that often confuses and occasionally bores—all these qualities offer a window into the broader human story that a novel coloring strictly inside the lines could never achieve. It’s a risky, funny, sexy, entirely unique book, and its odd corners make it easier to love ... But then I consider the project of postmodernism, and whether a postmodern novel has to add up to or say anything, and it doesn’t, really ... Perhaps that’s why CoDex 1962 dissatisfied me: I sought a lesson in the Calvinist sense, but I shouldn’t have.
Lidia Yuknavitch
Rave The Rumpus Perhaps the state of American life explains the explosive power of The Book of Joan, or perhaps it’s the other way around; perhaps, at last, American life is ready for Lidia Yuknavitch ... Yuknavitch leans on the significance of these figures’ histories, but she does not depend on it. She draws on old, old stories, the tales humans have been telling each other since stories were illuminated on parchment, and before. Further, each character possesses a sacred relationship to narrative, which is treated as a sacrament throughout the novel ... By rejecting Western patterns of narrative, and by embracing and repositioning figures from those patterns, Yuknavitch makes The Book of Joan one of the boldest novels yet of the 21st century.