PanVultureThere may be no American filmmaker alive other than Terrence Malick who has volunteered less insight into his art — his writing process, his taste in actors, his creative struggles, when he thinks he succeeded or failed, why he made the choices he made, what, if anything — please, anything! — he felt ambivalent about ... the list of what Allen is not interested in could and does fill a book and includes, first and foremost, himself. We know this because he misses no opportunity to tell us ... So forget the movies — he certainly has. What remains is the man, and on that score, Apropos of Nothing is one of the most unsettling accounts of a life I ever hope never to encounter again, a slick comedy routine that evolves into a wildly protracted self-justification, then into the longest, most seething deposition/prosecutorial brief in history, only to finish as a series of generic toasts and hat tips. From its first pages, what is meant to amuse is as discomforting as steel-wool underwear ... This is writing about coldness so coldly that you can’t tell what’s giving you chills, the content or the tone, the cruelty alleged or the casualness with which three deaths are enlisted to allege it. It is brain-breaking, and the most coherent thought I could muster about it was \'What kind of person talks this way?\'
Sarah Meuleman
MixedNew York Times Book ReviewThere is a lot that needs to be forgiven in the early stages of this novel ... Showing one’s hand like that doesn’t help a thriller, nor does leaning on \'Where is this all going?\' for as long as Find Me Gone does ... becomes a stranger and darker novel than its beginning suggests.
Sarah Pinborough
MixedThe New York Times\"...Sixty pages in, Cross Her Heart still feels less like a thriller than like one of those books with a drearily earnest set of reader’s guide questions at the end: \'What did you think of Lisa’s choices? Do you think Lisa and Ava have more in common than they realize?\' But stick with it, because when Pinborough unveils her first surprise about a third of the way in, it’s a good one, so good that even the legally mandated device that kicks in with it — chapters headed \'Now,\' \'After\' and \'Before\' — doesn’t slow her novel’s momentum ... The mechanics aren’t deftly concealed here, but the machine itself works, motoring toward about five different endings. Cross Her Heart also has a welcome sisterhood-is-powerful vibe; it’s a novel that defines women by their relationships with one another, even as their creator is ruthlessly shoving them into position for the next twist.
\
Camilla Way
MixedThe New York Times Book ReviewAnyone who grew up on mass-market paperbacks for which the cover art was some forbidding version of a blood-spattered, blankly staring broken doll will feel an almost nostalgic connection to this novel ... The writing isn’t dazzling, but the construction and pacing are solid, staying just far enough ahead of the reader to be fun ... nobody ever said thrillers have to play nice as long as they play fair.
Sara Gran
RaveThe New York Times Book Review\"One of the most exciting things about Sara Gran’s The Infinite Blacktop...is the way it uses all of these often restrictive neo-conventions to its advantage in order to create a completely original hybrid of mystery, thriller, contemporary noir, dark comedy and postmodern meditation about what it means to be a detective ... Gran makes...fragmentation, in which no single story line ever becomes central, feel organic to her main character, who also seems constructed out of jagged shards ... Gran has an engagingly sardonic voice and a sure grip of storytelling basics, even those she is manifestly interested in ignoring or transcending ... The Infinite Blacktop is droll, savage and healthily unsettling, even at moments when it verges on becoming an essay about its own construction.
Claire Fuller
MixedThe New York Times Book ReviewFuller, a skilled stylist, is very good at letting you get to know Frances by degrees and at describing a setting in which the ordinary rules of life feel suspended. She conveys the exoticism of a temporary new home and the eroticism of a temporary new attachment ... She keeps the suspense at such a low simmer—as if Anita Brookner had decided to try her hand at a potboiler—that you might be forgiven for wondering if, at times, the flame has gone out altogether ... Too much of Bitter Orange consists of two interesting, dramatic people doling out selective information to their undramatic listener; even as the noose tightens (and it does), you sense you could still slip out of it. It’s a tribute to Fuller’s abilities that even when her plot feels slight, the atmosphere she conjures creates its own choking sense of dread.
