PositiveVulture\"Vara...sings a song all her own in a premonitory, daring book that lands somewhere between speculative fiction and bildungsroman, storytelling and fortune-telling ... The novel flashes through time and space with an agile clarity from before King’s birth to grown-up Athena’s present day. Yet Vara has not exactly made this book an easy read ... Perhaps it makes sense that some of the most trenchant work on the shortcomings of technotopia is written by women. Outnumbered in the industry, women drawn to the tech ecosystem can find an outsider’s position from which to make sense of its overlords ... The Immortal King Rao too thrums with a pulse.\
Jennifer Egan
PositiveVulture... dizzying, in scope and achievement. Egan telescopes in on more than a dozen characters with an unnerving mastery ... At times, Egan’s approach feels almost too masterful. Rather than assert its contours organically through the course of character development, racial identity reads like just another tool in her arsenal ... Not that anything feels forced, exactly. Egan moves her players around in exhilarating ways ... Egan never shows us her eluders, though; we never go with them into the wilderness. Instead, we remain inside the Candy House of fairy-tale lore, a beautifully constructed novel where the human capacity to feel and touch persists. Perhaps it’s a trap that feels like protection.
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
MixedThe Atlantic\"Lines that could read as standard Orientalism, here feel more like the opening of a secret. Jhabvala writes how people talk, or how people used to talk. Her stories bespeak a slice of time during which people could both interact with others quite unlike them and talk with the expectation of privacy with people quite like them ... Jhabvala’s blunt characterizations can edge into typecasting. If they haven’t flowered into magnificent birds, the Indian women in these stories tend to lose their beauty to sloth and food, to widen as the European women in the stories never seem to, to bear paan-stained teeth and an animal scent ... Indeed, Jhabvala’s moodiness arguably accounts for her strengths. Her hawkish eye pairs with an intolerance for the sort of romanticism that attends other European chroniclers of India ... The stories she wrote in this later setting, included toward the end of the new collection, lack the unsettling power of her India-set ones.\
