RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewPowerful and timely ... Carr is interested in the expressive potency of the body, and the novel is meticulously structured to highlight its enduring cultural significance. At the same time, the book is less interested in explaining or rationalizing that significance than in dramatizing how it literally feels ... It is a testament to Carr’s power as a writer that she is able to so clearly represent these aspects of her characters’ experiences with such intimacy and honesty.
Honoree Fanonne Jeffers
RaveThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’s extraordinary debut novel is among other things a potent assertion of the significance of history (and its denial) in our efforts to understand the present ... In Jeffers’s moving and evocative prose, the novel makes clear that an honest appreciation of the impact of slavery and its enduring legacy remain essential to an understanding of contemporary American culture and society. The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois is written with an understanding that to engage honestly with this history is not a matter of casting blame for the mistakes of the past but of cultivating a mature understanding of Americans and America in the hope that those mistakes will not be repeated.
