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Recent Reviews
Amy Jo Burns
Positive The New York Times Book Review \"Her whodunit and motive feel unimportant and, at times, unnecessarily confusing. But Mercury is a character-driven novel; the point isn’t the plot, but what the people enacting it reveal about themselves. Though the book covers only nine years, there’s something epic about the love story at its heart ... And so the most powerful tension in this novel doesn’t come from the dead body. It comes from the question of whether Marley will demand a place for herself—and for her voice to be heard.\
Michelle Huneven
Positive The New York Times Book Review I enjoyed this book and found myself wanting to return to it so I could find out who \'won.\' However, I did have trouble nailing down the \'so what?\' of it all. At some point around halfway through, I noticed that I wasn’t feeling quite worried enough about the outcome. I was following the action, but holding it at arm’s length .. That aside, this novel has plot, character, structure and a delicious, deeply human pettiness that I think most honest readers will relate to. And speaking of delicious, Huneven’s descriptions of food are the best I’ve ever read, by far the most vivid prose in the book.
Jessica Winter
Rave The New York Times ... intense ... There is something so authentic about Jane, something so completely opposite of cunning, that it’s impossible not to feel for her even though you know she’s doing pretty much everything wrong ... The novel is structured around Jane’s and Lauren’s points of view, and through them, over a span of nearly 20 years, we get a vivid portrait of female coming-of-age. In the areas of growing awareness of one’s own sexuality, how social power is brokered, how belief systems are formed, Winter is a genius. The details of a back-of-the-school-bus encounter between a group of Lauren’s classmates around the year 1990 felt lifted from my own 1990 and I had to put the book down for a moment ... Alongside zoomed-in scenes like these, Winter finds subtle ways to remind the reader of the larger world ... I worry that all this talk of Catholicism and saints might put some readers off, but truly, this is a secular book, and Winter’s greatest accomplishment is that she takes on enormous, highly charged topics — faith, the right to choose, female identity — and presents a story without one shred of moralizing. I laughed aloud in places. Winter is very funny ... Like a writer in complete control of her talent, Winter trusts the reader to understand. Her restraint calls to mind the great Mavis Gallant, who also put a huge amount of trust in her reader (and was also darkly funny).
Jennifer Rosner
Rave The New York Times Book Review Rosner’s exquisite, heart-rending debut novel is proof that there’s always going to be room for another story about World War II ... This is an absolutely beautiful and necessary novel, full of heartbreak but also hope, about the bond between mother and daughter, and the sacrifices made for love.