PositiveLos Angeles Review of BooksImbler mixes careful fragments of biography with selected bits of marine science to produce a unique and powerful debut, an alluring series of metaphors to describe what it means to be young and trans ... Imbler does a good job of building both the crabs’ and the clubgoers’ stories with precise and patient detail, allowing the reader to notice parallels without having to learn some kind of lesson. The method is a high-wire act, with many opportunities to go wrong, but the result is a mixture of excellent science reportage and affecting memoir. In the process, the book punches holes in old tropes of wildlife documentaries ... Imbler’s posture throughout the book is watchful and quiet, intelligent, self-aware, sometimes victimized, sometimes passive-aggressive. The cuttlefish chapter is resonant but reveals a natural weakness in the science writing ... The best passages in How Far the Light Reaches paint in the lightless depths.
Geraldine Schwarz
RaveLos Angeles Review of Books... [an] exacting and detailed memoir, a blend of personal and political history ... Ms. Schwarz is short on details about her grandfather, but she describes in vivid detail one of the largest French roundups of Jews, and she notes the antisemitism waiting just under the surface of everyday life ... This fresh translation by Laura Marris into English is overdue, but not because Schwarz’s family saga is so unique: it’s a typical story of opportunism and survival by a bourgeois family in 20th-century Europe, repeated from one end of the continent to another. It’s also a powerful primer in the self-ignorance that allowed so many Europeans to act the way they did when someone offered them the barest excuse. The stories are vital, and Schwarz is a meticulous, eloquent chronicler.
Ingrid Betancourt
PanThe Los Angeles Review of BooksThe [clairvoyant] conceit helps Betancourt hold her fractured story together. It also feels forced and thin. Her publishers call it 'magical realism,' but by now that’s just industry jargon for something that can’t happen in real life but does happen in Latin American novels. Betancourt’s flights of fancy lack the poetic force of the surrealism in Borges or García Márquez.
