RaveNPRSarah M. Broom\'s gorgeous debut, The Yellow House, reads as elegy and prayer ... Sarah M. Broom is a writer of great intellect and breadth. She embraces momentous subjects. The Yellow House is about the relentless divestment of wealth from the African American family no matter how hard its members work; and our government\'s failure to protect its poor from predictable environmental catastrophe and subsequent trauma; and our gross neglect of poor neighborhoods; and sham promises that never materialize or are broken too easily, and the papering over of deep systemic problems by politicians and we the people. The Yellow House is also about the persistence of love and grit ... If Broom has bitten off the whole world and cannot quite swallow it, we can only hope she will continue to mine this material with the same sensitivity and insight demonstrated in The Yellow House. She understands her questions are \'at base, unanswerable\' .... Nevertheless, we will eagerly await her further interrogations.
Lynn Steger Strong
PositiveThe MillionsHold Still drills down on emotions, and the lack thereof. Throughout the novel, one emotion that Maya owns, and owns powerfully, is her love for Ellie. Mother and daughter are so conjoined that Maya’s carefully curated New York life falls apart in parallel with Ellie’s in Florida. Maya’s love for her daughter endures, the opposite of lightness and avoidance. On the contrary, it is anchoring, if fraught ... tortured, grounding love serves as the necessary glue between mother and daughter. And that, perhaps, is the bottom line.
