About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Leah Myers
Rave The New York Times Book Review Thinning Blood is slender and poetic but also wide-ranging, moving with ease from memoir to Native history to myth and back again, yielding a blend that transcends genre ... With remarkable concision, Myers evokes the awful progression of their relationship, in scenes so vivid they left me gasping for air. The statistics she invokes — on domestic violence and missing and murdered Native women — feel anything but abstract.
Rachel Jamison Webster
Positive The Washington Post Sweeping, frequently insightful, often speculative and sometimes extremely moving ... As a reading experience, I ultimately found Molly’s life as imagined by Webster less immersive than most of the others in the book, in part because Molly isn’t always allowed the same human contradictions and subtleties as other characters but at times seems to become a vehicle for Webster’s didactic aims ... I was intensely drawn in and touched by Webster’s portrayals of some of her other kinfolk ... I also was glad to see her grappling with whether and how she, as a White woman, should tell her ancestors’ stories. And I admired Webster’s sleuthing into recently uncovered documents that reveal that Molly repeatedly treated her children as enslaved property she was setting free. Here Webster’s interpretation of the documents is illuminating ... I have immense sympathy with Webster’s attraction to the use of imagination in re-creating her people, and with her view that spiritual as well as empirical storytelling is needed to address the harms Black ancestors like hers endured even before this nation’s founding ... Still, I wished the historical narrative threads were more explicitly delineated.
Sarah Waters
Rave NPR \"Class anxiety is the animating force behind Waters\' fifth book, The Little Stranger, a suspenseful and psychologically layered haunted-house story set in the aftermath of World War II, when the fading gentry collided with the emerging professional class that would once have been the help … Waters, a master at stoking anticipation, withholds the truth about her ghost until the final pages. By then we already strongly suspect its identity, but the confirmation is subtle, surprising, and deeply, deeply chilling.\
Aleksandar Hemon
Positive The Boston Globe A similar sense of the indefensibility of bloodshed underlies Aleksandar Hemon\'s stunning new novel, The Lazarus Project. The book opens on March 2, 1908, but the date could be a century later ... Hemon has always drawn on his own experiences in fiction, and Brik\'s quest has a real-life counterpart ... In the book at least, the search is not merely for the facts of one man\'s life, but for more complex truths about life and death, hope and despair, love and hate ... Hemon\'s characters eschew the notion that truth is tidy, or literal ... The most faintly drawn character in this otherwise vivid novel, Mary is a cut-out of a successful American woman... Her flatness is part of the point: Our narrator is falling out of love with a Midwesterner whose limited experience prevents her from comprehending evil.
Rachel Kushner
Rave NPR Rachel Kushner's brilliant lightning bolt of a novel, The Flamethrowers, straddles two revolutions: the squatter-artist colonization of Manhattan's SoHo in the 1970s, and the rise of Italy's radical left during the same period … The Flamethrowers is an entire world, intimately and convincingly observed, filled with characters whose desires feel true. It is also an uncannily perceptive portrait of our culture — psychologically and philosophically astute, candid about class, art, sex and the position of women — with a deadly accuracy that recalls the young Joan Didion, and that, despite the precisely rendered historical backdrop, gives the story a timeless urgency.