RaveNPR...there\'s a niggling feeling of being inside your own life that attacks you in your late 20s ... Meditations on this specific stage of adulthood are laced throughout music-critic Jessica Hopper\'s tightly-written memoir Night Moves ... The memoir reads like a journal ... Despite the lack of a narrative thread connecting the entries, Hopper\'s accounts of the jobs she took to get by, the kinds of people she met, and the shows she went to in an era before ubiquitous cell phones resonate because of their familiarity and her humor ... She writes about specific, mundane encounters with such keen observations that each moment is universal ... Though each of these moments — rendered with Hopper\'s dry humor and wit — bring a complicated city\'s many facets to life, it\'s her riffs on the life that she\'s participating in that give Night Moves heft.
Leah Dieterich
RaveNPRHer writing is crisp and intelligent, she relies on architecture, Greek mythology and even language to place her relationship in the context of a wider world ... The connections she draws between intimate relationships and twinships, dance and even typography are revealed lyrically. Her writing can sometimes seem disjointed; Dieterich intentionally leaves out the connective tissue that can so often weigh down memoirs, allowing her readers to make their own decisions about the ways in which our worlds are centered around relationships ... Readers might be struck by the raw honesty of Dieterich\'s ruminations ... Ultimately, the book was better for this technique: Dieterich maintains her searching, inquisitive voice throughout Vanishing Twins.
Nicole Chung
RaveNPRIn her memoir, All You Can Ever Know, Chung writes with an empathy that\'s careful to consider the perspectives of everyone involved in her adoption story ... The detail is useful for the reader to understand that Chung\'s search will ultimately be successful, but the book is still paced like a mystery: the how and the when and the why of Chung\'s reunion is what drives the tale ... Chung\'s writing is never overtly sentimental, but it\'s crisp and clear and evocative ... Chung manages to make every moment she spent second-guessing her decision to search feel newly relevant ... Though the story is intensely personal, it\'s never myopic and, ultimately, it\'s universal.
Kim Brooks
PositiveNPRBrooks\'s own personal experience provides the narrative thrust for the book — she writes unflinchingly about her own experience. In the pages, Brooks is extremely relatable. She writes about her children and her parents with a wry humor that helps the reader really get a sense of who she is as a person. It\'s a quality that makes her endearing and frustrating ... Readers who want to know what happened to Brooks will keep reading to learn how the case against her proceeds, but it\'s Brooks\'s questions about why mothers are so judgmental and competitive that give the book its heft.
Jean Guerrero
RaveNPR\"Guerrero\'s writing is expressive and affecting, especially in the moments where she grounds her reader in her own exploration of the mystical ... But there are moments where it slips into the melodramatic ... The book is deeply researched and tightly written.\
