RaveNew York Times Book ReviewTender, beautiful and radiantly outraged ... True Biz is moving, fast-paced and spirited — we have vivid access to all of the main characters’ points of view — but also skillfully educational ... Novic...makes an urgent and heartfelt case for the schools’ importance in providing language access, and in nurturing community and a sense of self. Great stories create empathy and awareness more effectively than facts do, and this important novel should — true biz — change minds and transform the conversation.
David Mitchell
RaveNPRMitchell's book seemed like everything I couldn't do. It's a nested box of stories, each one a virtuosic performance in an entirely different style from the last … Civilization as we know it ends, in the novel, and the center section is a post-apocalyptic folktale in which only fragments of language and culture remain. Then Mitchell picks up his abandoned stories, one by one, and tells what happened … The book isn't a cold display of cleverness: It has a heart, and a fierce intelligence and a single, recurring soul.
Sarah Domet
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewThe Guineveres, Sarah Domet’s deft and lovely debut, is the perfect weight, in all ways. It’s suitable for a vacation, and you can describe it in one inviting line, but then it keeps unfolding and deepening, taking unexpected turns ... Intercut with their collective story are Vere’s retellings of the lives of the saints. These chapters emerge as examples, often gory, of women rejecting the meager possibilities offered to them — forced marriage, circumscribed existence — in a desperate search for something more exalted, a greater purpose ... inside the walls, a vivid, pungent, complex universe hums. And for Vere, the inner life of the passions is where the extraordinary and miraculous events occur.
