MixedThe New York Times Book Reviewan abstruse series of fragmented fables, interspersed with the saga of a present-day grad student who is a voracious reader and connoisseur of retro cocktails. All three of Zachary Ezra Rawlins’s names march forth at the outset of every chapter in which he is featured, in case one forgets he is the hero. (One does not forget) ... Sound thrilling? It certainly might be, but it isn’t ... Morgenstern’s attempt to mingle a dozen or so narratives into an intertwined myth is strangely devoid of tension for a book in which a nameless woman’s tongue is cut out on Page 10. We flit from story to story like bees — bees, keys, swords, crowns and hearts dance a heady symbolic gavotte throughout — never knowing where we might land, or who will turn out to really be who, or if the pirate is a real pirate or a metaphor, or whether any of it has a point ... As a story about stories, Morgenstern’s latest contains the seeds of its own destruction: It abandons people in favor of theme ... Every relationship is unearned or uncomplicated, or based on untold back stories ... The lack of distinct character voice seems due to the fact it is unabashed fan fiction, but not a homage to any particular individual ... You can taste the potions and the sidecars. But a cigar is never just a cigar, and it’s impossible to settle in without being bludgeoned by mystique ... flounders as a novel. As an ode to an aesthetic, however, it is marvelous ... for those swept away by the romance of its imagery, The Starless Sea will provide hours of honey-drenched bliss. Or at the very least, inspiration for a new tattoo, or a vision board for their impending destination wedding.
Elizabeth Macneal
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewWhen a book refuses to shy away from squalor and brutality while venerating the passionate and beautiful, it is always a memorable experience ... Joining this list of haunting novels is Elizabeth Macneal’s unapologetically lush debut, The Doll Factory, which will doubtless prove as much of an obsession for its readers as the art model Iris Whittle is to the men around her ... Macneal’s immersive epic stays firmly rooted in historical fact, inviting comparison to Erik Larson and The Devil in the White City ... Macneal is clearly engrossed in the Pre-Raphaelite movement and especially in the plight of women who were churned through the gristmill of poverty and spat out again. There is hardly an aspect of Victorian London that she has not mastered ... People who scoff at Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre may belittle The Doll Factory, with its strong whiff of fairy-tale romanticism. Ignore them. Iris is a dreamer, and dreamers are inherently romantic.
W.M Akers
RaveThe New York Times...[a] superb debut...a novel steeped in existentialism while delivering gun molls, drunken wastrels and purebred thugs. ... Akers’s choice to spotlight a sleuth preoccupied by \'those impossible puzzles that burrow into our brains like splinters\' is viscerally effective. In this world, a missing coffeepot can mean more than a murder, and the unbearably pure joy of baseball statistics can sustain a lost soul. An alcoholic father could ruin someone’s life, yes — but so could having the fragment of a tune stuck in one’s head for decades ... A world that could be completely unwieldy is rendered tangible in the sounds of street music, glimpses of skittering shadows and whiffs of violent smells. One cannot effectively borrow from the horror genre as freely as Akers does without concrete imagery to sustain the imagination. His prose is sharply crystalline, especially when describing minute, bittersweet and even ugly moments ... Westside suffers from overabundance, but such is only natural for a novel in which a lush entropic force has swallowed the West Village.
