RaveThe Miami HeraldStylish, acerbic and wickedly funny, Margaret Atwood has assembled a group of stories in which people reflect on past lives while soldiering on ... The first three stories in the collection, 'Alphinland,' 'Revenant' and 'Dark Lady' read like outtakes from a novel, as they depend heavily on backstory set in the 1960s... Atwood is quite wonderful at drawing what comes next and what may happen after that. It’s a swift, neat trick, cleverly brought off ... With wit, sympathy and precision, Atwood draws readers into a reflective frame of mind. Then again, thinking about old age and what follows is an inevitable stage of life.
Haruki Murakami
PositiveThe Miami HeraldQuestions beget questions in this brilliant new novel by Haruki Murakami ... As narrator, Murakami travels effortlessly through time and space and takes the reader with him ... Powerful, disturbing dreams suggest he may be at fault ... We are in the gray area between imagination and physical reality, where the trains run on time, but everything else is up for grabs ... Much more accessible than IQ84 and, for that matter, most Murakami titles, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki has a strong storyline and sharply drawn characters whose motives are ambiguous: a perfect introduction to Murakami’s world, where questions of guilt and motivation abound, and the future is an open question.
Stieg Larsson, Translated by Reg Keeland
PositiveThe Tampa Bay TimesArriving here under the banner International Bestseller, Stieg Larsson's wintery look into the Swedish psyche is densely packed and oddly disappointing ... Billed as a thriller, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo has all the elements: murder on a remote island, journalist turned detective, girl hacker intent on helping him solve the mystery — and person or persons unknown, out to get them ...we wade through a tedious account of how and why Blomkvist was disgraced, which involves an expose based on information from a character we're never going to see again. It ties in, but not soon enough ... There's also plenty of gore, amazing sadism — but it all takes too long to get where it's going and trickles on afterward for way too many pages. If Larsson had cut to the chase, this would have worked, but it doesn't. Blame those Swedish winters.
Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney
MixedThe Miami HeraldThe most interesting characters are not the greedy siblings — although their machinations and social confrontations are amusing — but Melody’s twin daughters, Nora and Louisa, who ditch those SAT classes to hang out with rebellious Simone ... Less successful are the author’s attempts to broaden the scope of her first novel with a 9/11 subplot and a closer look at Matilda’s life: the injury, the prosthesis she rejects, the war veteran who urges her on by demonstrating his prosthetic arm. Even so, The Nest is swift and entertaining and would be a natural fit for film or TV.
